Author: Serkadis

	First downtowns, and now suburbs: how cars change American geography From 250 million to 246 million. It’s not a big change, but the trend could continue.		Chicago 2010: Ford Transit Connect Electric uses the “Force Drive” Ford’s first electric vehicle is coming later this year.
	Chicago 2010: Ford Transit Connect Taxi burns CNG, LPG and four acres of space Yes, four acres. We thought it was weird to.	Other news: Fiat 500 gets new 1.3-liter MultiJet diesel engine and 60 mpg Former Bears coach Mike Ditka promotes electric cars at Chicago Auto Show in Orlando Eco City Vehicles reveals upcoming all-electric taxi

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Volume 25: PICTOGRAMS OR PSEUDO SCRIPT? Non-Textual Identity Marks in Practical Use in Ancient Egypt and Elsewhere. Proceedings of a Conference in Leiden, 19-20 December 2006.
B.J.J. Haring and O.E. Kaper (eds.)
VII, 236 pp.; ISBN 978-90-6258-225-9
€ 45,–

Marking systems such as masons’ marks, property marks, pot marks, quarry marks and team marks confront us with the large variation in the use of graphic signs. They are often similar to writing, yet they are not script in the strictest sense of the word. The practical purposes of marks include claims to property and responsibilities, both individual and collective, for which also regular scripts are used. The marking systems are seen to operate in combination with writing, but frequently also in isolation. In societies that use writing, the marks appear to be strongly influenced by it: their shapes are often identical and they may be similarly arranged in lines or columns. In this sense the marking systems may be called a pseudo script, for in spite of their resemblance to writing, the signs remain mere pictograms.

This volume brings together for the first time the results of research on practical marking systems in ancient Egypt and other cultures, making it possible to define the common characteristics of their appearance and their uses. It is the result of a conference hosted by the Egyptology Department at Leiden University in 2006.

The great geographical and chronological range covered by the volume, the sign corpora added to many of the contributions, and the indices also make it the first important reference work on this intriguing topic.

The “Egyptological Publications” series is co-published by the Netherlands Institute for the Near East, Leiden, and Peeters Publishers, Leuven. Volumes may be ordered from both publishers:
or

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Egypt State Information Service

Culture Minister: 198 antiquities renovated, restored in Cairo

Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni said on 9/2/2010 that 198 antiquities were renovated and restored from the 517 that were damaged during the 1992 earthquake in Cairo.

He added that the remaining antiquities will be restored, pointing to the cooperation between Antiquities Authority, Ministry of Endowments, Cairo Governorate to restore the Islamic antiquities in el-Mouez and el-Gamalia streets, which will be an open museum.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Art Museum Journal (Stan Parchin)

To Live Forever: Art and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt is a traveling special exhibition devoted to Egyptian funerary art, practices and beliefs. In preparation for the show, scholars at New York’s Brooklyn Museum used modern scientific methods to analyze its collection of mummified remains. On July 5, 2007, conservators embarked upon an extensive study of five human and nearly 50 avian, feline and crocodile mummies. Experts from the Brooklyn Museum, the Getty Conservation Institute and the University of Bristol were led in their endeavor by Dr. Edward Bleiberg, Curator of Egyptian, Classical and Ancient Middle Eastern Art.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

After pressure at work led Antony to experience mental health difficulties, a referral from his GP led him to a programme of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT).  Antony credits the programme with helping him to regain his confidence and motivation and assist him in finding employment again.

Antony Lane from Stoke suffered from extreme stress, depression, and panic attacks following a period of heavy pressure and change at work. As a result of his condition, he ultimately lost his job.

Antony, 40, initially took anti-depressant medication but found that this did not work for him.  For a period, he was unsure what else he could try, until a friend of his wife recommended Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.

His doctor was able to refer him to the Healthy Minds Network, a service funded by the Local Health Authority, which was free for Antony. 

“I initially found it difficult to talk to people about what I was going through,” Antony says.  “I didn’t fully realise what was happening to me, but with the help and support of my wife and family, I realised I had to do something.”

Antony started meeting regularly with Tariq, a practitioner at Healthy Minds, who started a course of CBT with him.  The CBT helped Antony to challenge his negative thoughts and motivate him to plan and structure his days. 

Antony wanted to get back into employment, but initially struggled to find work during what was a difficult time. One of the staff at Healthy Minds was able to provide support in understanding his benefit entitlements and starting his search for work.

Unable to drive, Antony found it difficult to rely on family and friends to give him lifts to his sessions with Tariq. Healthy Minds agreed with Antony to continue the CBT sessions by phone. After six weeks of telephone calls, Antony feels he is back to his normal self. Antony credits the CBT treatment as vital in helping him get through such a difficult time in his life.

“It was great to have the flexibility of speaking to Tariq on the phone,” he says. “The whole of the Healthy Minds team really helped.”

Antony is now back in employment, working part-time at a local theatre, and plans to return to a full-time role which makes use of his people skills.  He continues to use the CBT techniques he learnt and applies them across all areas of his life.

With his confidence growing again, Antony has been invited to talk about his experience with CBT to a wider audience.  He has spoken to Swedish Health Authorities who are interested in adopting a similar service to Healthy Minds, and has presented at a conference to over 250 health professionals.

To improve care for people with mental health difficulties in this country, Antony says that: “there needs to be greater understanding about where people can go for help, as it was hard to know where to start at first.  It is important to reach people who otherwise wouldn’t be reached.

“There is still a social stigma about mental health,” Antony says. “But if people are having difficulties they really need to talk to their families, friends and to health professionals.”

If there was any doubt that Facebook is very serious about chat, it’s gone now. The social network has rolled out support for the Jabber/XMPP protocol almost two years after it announced it was working on it. What this means is that you will be able to chat with your Facebook friends using the desktop and mobile IM software of your choice without… (read more)

Al Masry Al Youm (Andrew Bossone)

For the first time, a contemporary exhibit is being displayed at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The exhibit features drawings from the Edfu temple that few people ever get to see. Spanish artists and professors Assunción Jódar Miñarro and Ricardo Marín Viadel created hundreds of pictures, some of which are more than two meters in height, from the western staircase in Edfu.

The exhibition, “Drawings of the time: Impressions from Edfu Temple,” is in the museum until 8 April, and is a modern interpretation of ancient artwork. The artists describe their work–pictures drawn of 31 priest figures–as a blend of art and documentation, combing individual creativity with the tradition of sketching ancient sites.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Toshiba has once again shown of its Tranferjet short range wireless networking service, and according to Reg Hardware is expecting to release hardware into the market soon using the technology.

The main feature that differentiates Transferjet from other wireless technologies such as Bluetooth is its extremely short range (only 3 cm) and the lack of need to pair the two devices, meaning proximity will be used as the authorization for transfer.

The technology is expected to appear first in laptops, cameras and TV’s, but may also arrive in smartphones, as demoed in the video above on a modified TG01.

Read more about the latest developments at The Register here.

Via Engadget.com

Article Tags: Rebecca Terrell

As much as the scientists at the center of Climategate wish it would just fade away, new evidence keeps surfacing to fan the flames of controversy. The latest item regards weather monitoring stations situated in remote parts of rural China.

The Climategate e-mails implicate two influential climate researchers in fraudulent cover-up of Chinese temperature data. According to The Guardian, the numbers didn’t fit with their climate models showing dramatic rise in global warming. The researchers are Dr. Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University (a group influential in composing the UN’s keystone climate reports), and Dr. Wei-Chyung Wang, a professor at the University at Albany.

In 1990, Jones and Wang published a paper in the journal Nature concluding the “urban heat effect” has little to do with global warming. They used temperature data from a quickly urbanizing area of eastern China to illustrate their findings, specifically data from 84 weather stations with few significant moves. The issue of moves was important to prove how significantly urban sprawl affected temperature readings at originally outlying stations over time. The UN’s 2007 climate report, known as the Fourth Assessment Report or AR4, quoted the Nature paper saying that urban sprawl has little to do with rising global temperatures.

Source: thenewamerican.com

Read in full with comments »   

Article Tags: Web Article

How global-warming deniers are running circles around the U.N.’s top climate body.

Three years ago, Rajendra K. Pachauri was accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N.’s climate science panel. Now the IPCC head is under fire from critics for a catalogue of recent embarrassments: his initial kneejerk defense of the “Climategate” emails (Pachauri first questioned the motives of those who had hacked into the University of East Anglia’s email system, then said there was “virtually no possibility” that IPCC findings were impacted), the fight he picked with the Indian environmental minister when the latter questioned certain data on glacier melt within India (Pachauri called the government report’s “voodoo science”), and the steamy soft-core novel, Return to Almora, he released last month (somewhere between memoir and fantasy, it features the sexual exploits of a 60-something globetrotting climate expert, and has scandalized an Indian public not accustomed to its masturbating scenes and erotic explicitness).

Click source to read more

Source: foreignpolicy.com

Read in full with comments »   

Article Tags: ClimateGate, Himalayan Glacier Data

The credibility crisis facing the UN’s climate panel over errors in its 2007 report has cast a shadow on IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri. Now, top researchers in Germany are among those calling for his resignation.

Despite flawed reports and ongoing criticism, Rajendra Pachauri has said he will not step down from his post as head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). UN leaders have also dismissed calls for his resignation.

Yet some members of the scientific community in Germany and abroad have taken a different view. His departure is seen as a potential path toward helping the panel recover from an embarrassing series of faulty assessments, released within the IPCC’s fourth and most recent assessment report.

The IPCC recently admitted it had erred in forecasting that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035, a claim it has since retracted. The mistake was originally published as part of the panel’s report from 2007, which serves as the scientific authority for climate change issues.

Source: dw-world.de

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There’s one thing you can say about oppressive regimes, they don’t give up easily. The fact that the cat and mouse game never ends doesn’t seem to faze them too much. Case and point, there are now reports that the Iranian government has blocked Gmail in the country ahead of expected protests set for today, February 11 which marks the 31st annive… (read more)

Tom sends over the story of an independent filmmaker, Stevie Long, who wrote and acted in the low-budget indie film Strictly Sexual that has found tremendous success by being online where people can watch it for free. Apparently, Long had a deal with some sort of online distributor, who got the film on Hulu, and word of mouth made it the most watched film on Hulu, ever:

“I woke up one morning and found a dozen or so messages in my Facebook inbox, saying, ‘Hey, I just saw this film, and it really touched me, and I love the way it talks about breakups and relationships,’ ” Long says. “And I just scratched my head, saying, ‘Where’d you see my movie?’ I had no idea what Hulu was. God bless the people who had the foresight to put it up there…. We were fortunate in that the timing of the Internet and the ability to watch movies came about at the same time. I didn’t have any ego about it as an artist, I just wanted my movie to be seen.”

But, of course, it’s not hurting him financially either:

“I’ll give it to you in these rough terms,” he says. “The $100,000 film has made 10 times its money.”

But… but… but… we keep having Hollywood insiders tell us in our comments that indie filmmakers who distribute online can’t possibly make back enough money to cover their costs. Everything’s impossible until someone does it.

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Yet the last time U.S. debt-to-GDP hit levels comparable to the current status was at the end of World War II when debt-to-GDP hit 108.6%, which is far higher than where we are now.

Even the, yes, the U.S. eventually brought its debt-to-GDP ratio down over time, thus history indeed teaches us that the U.S. can eventually get things under control. It's been proven that economic growth over time can bring down this ratio even if debt keeps growing, as long as nominal GDP growth outpaces debt growth.

That's what the U.S. achieved in the past:

Looking Back: A History Lesson

War debt burden was reduced not through budget surpluses... World War 2 left the US with a large debt overhang. In 1946, US public debt was 108.6% of GDP. Nearly 60 years later, in 2003, public debt to GDP was just 36%. Within two generations, debt had been reduced by over 70pp of GDP. This corresponds to an average decrease of debt/GDP (‘the debt ratio’) by 1.2% every year (see column 1 of Exhibit 2). How was this achieved? Remarkably, between 1946 and 2003 the federal budget was, on average, in deficit, to the tune of 1.6% of GDP (column 2) as the surplus in the primary balance (0.3% of GDP on average – column 3) was not enough to cover interest payments on the debt (1.9% of GDP on average – not shown here).

...but through (nominal) economic growth... So how was the debt ratio reduced despite the US government having, on average, run budget deficits? The answer is, of course, through growth in nominal GDP. The denominator in debt/GDP grew faster than the numerator, bringing down the ratio over time. By how much, exactly? Nominal GDP growth reduced the debt/GDP ratio by 2.8%, on average, between 1948 and 2003 (column 3 of Exhibit 2 – see the Box in our full stand-alone note today for an explanation of our calculations).

Now here's the giant but -- But... looking more closely at the data, Morgan Stanley shows us how most of the growth in nominal GDP, that reduced America's debt-to-GDP ration, was the result of inflation. It wasn't mostly due to real GDP growth (Remember that nominal GDP growth = real GDP growth + inflation):

... with the inflation effect larger than the real GDP growth effect! But this begs a more important question: how much of the erosion of the debt was due to growth in the real economy and how much of it was due to inflation? We split the Nominal Growth Effect (NGE) on the debt ratio into a Real Growth Effect (RGE) and an Inflation Effect (IE; columns 5 and 6 of Exhibit 2 – which add up to column 3 but for rounding errors – we explain the accounting framework in the Appendix in the full stand-alone note).

Our numbers show that while real GDP growth reduced debt/GDP by 1.3% on average, the effect of inflation on the debt ratio was larger: 1.6%, on average, between 1946 and 2003 (In relative terms, 56% of the total Nominal Growth Effect on the debt ratio is due to inflation, with the remainder being due to real GDP growth.)

Which is why Morgan Stanley believes that the U.S. could be in for 4 - 6% inflation rates going forward, as a result of its projected debt burden and deficits:

Stabilisation of public debt to GDP at current levels would require average inflation rates between 4-6% over the coming decade – even under much lower budget deficits than currently in place. On our numbers, even with budget deficits that are much lower than the current (and projected) levels, average inflation over the next ten years would have to be substantially above 2% to keep debt in check. Even a balanced budget would require 3% average inflation over the next decade. With an average deficit as low as 3% of GDP, debt stabilisation would require average inflation above 6%.

Think it's obvious? Bond markets are completely blind to this potentiality given the paltry yields being offered for long-term debt.

The full report is an excellent read. (Via Morgan Stanley, The Return of Debtflation, Joachim Fels, 10 Feb 2010)

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See Also:

• PIMCO Goes Short The Entire Developed World
• Credit Suisse: America Now Has More Sovereign Risk Than Kazakhstan
• Goldman: If Greece Is Handled Wrong, All Of Southern Europe Will Fall Like Dominos And 30% Of Euro GDP Would Be At Risk

David Broder, a man with his finger on the pulse of the American people and all around soothsayer:

July 10, 1974 (paraphrase):

What if the House didn’t impeach Nixon? That would be pretty AWESOME! Talk about political comebacks, Nixon’s the one!

Nixon resigned in disgrace 30 days later.

February 16, 2007:

President Bush is poised for a political comeback

And today regarding Sarah Palin:

Those who want to stop her will need more ammunition than deriding her habit of writing on her hand. The lady is good.

Meanwhile, same paper, same day:

Although Palin is a tea party favorite, her potential as a presidential hopeful takes a severe hit in the survey. Fifty-five percent of Americans have unfavorable views of her, while the percentage holding favorable views has dipped to 37, a new low in Post-ABC polling.

There is a growing sense that the former Alaska governor is not qualified to serve as president, with more than seven in 10 Americans now saying she is unqualified, up from 60 percent in a November survey.

As much as I enjoy deriding Broder and having a rich vein of material to work with, even I’m embarrassed for him.

Google is now building its own phone, albeit with more than a little help from HTC, so there’s not much it can do that will truly be surprising. Just like the mythical GDrive, talks about Google offering its own internet connections have been around for years, but they are only now becoming a reality. The company has anno… (read more)