Saturday, February 3, 2007

The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and Cranbrook Art Museum debut Shrinking Cities. The project, which examines urban decline in cities across the globe is sponsored by Germany’s Federal Cultural Foundation.

Shrinking Cities includes contributions from more than 200 artists, architects, researchers, filmmakers, journalists, culture experts, and sociologists aimed not only at showing the effects of this global phenomenon but also exploring how to deal with it.

The project, which began in 2002, involves local teams from four cities: Detroit, USA, Manchester/Liverpool, Britain, Ivanavo, Russia and Halle/Leipzig, Germany. The teams examined the negatives and the positives of urban decline. Along with the exhibit contribution of the team and international idea competition was launched.

Shrinking Cities premiered in Berlin in 2004 and later traveled to Halle and Leipzig Germany. In Detroit it will run from 3 February until 1 April. Cranbrook Art Museum and the newly founded Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit will cohost the exhibit, with buses running in between the two.

Sunday, April 10, 2005

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, the San Jose, California-based joint venture of Japanese storage vendor Hitachi and U.S. technology giant IBM, has set a new record for storage density at 230 gigabits per square inch (Gb/in²). The company has developed technology to implement a recording method known as perpendicular recording, which allowed the increase in density above the current ~130 Gb/in² limit.

Techworld claims there is a race between Hitachi and Toshiba for who will get the first drives to market which use the technology. According to Hitachi, they expect, “to ship [their] first perpendicular recording product in 2005 on a 2.5-inch hard drive”. Toshiba is also planning to ship a drive in 2005 that uses perpendicular recording.

According to Techworld, Toshiba will ship an 80 GB, 1.8″ drive in 2005. Toshiba’s 1.8″ drives are used in portable electronic devices such as Apple’s iPod, which is currently available in sizes 60 GB and smaller.

While all commercially available hard drives to date use longitudinal recording, perpendicular recording has roots in research done in academic circles over 100 years ago.

Hitachi Tech has produced a Flash animation that explains the rudiments of perpendicular recording in a music-video style.

Inspired by the 1970s Schoolhouse Rock series of educational animation shorts, the flash movie features whimsical moments with data bits and disk platters that speak and sing (not possible with today’s technology), it also contains realistic details. Of no importance to the viewer, but perhaps of interest to some, the animation shows Texas Instruments’ UC5608DWP chips visible briefly in the background. While TI’s UC5608DWP 18-line SCSI terminator chips have been made obsolete by the new UCC5618, the chips are indeed designed for use in hard drives.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Billionaire Warren Buffett, Chief Executive of Berkshire Hathaway, auctioned lunch with himself on eBay for US$2.63 million.

Bidding, which started on eBay a few weeks ago, attracted nine bidders, offering huge sums for the opportunity to have a steak lunch with the man said to be a “legendary investor”.

The winning bidder, an anonymous individual, will be parting with $2.63 million for a meal with the world-famed investor and has the opportunity to bring along seven friends for the meal.

This, the latest of Buffett’s charity auctions, is providing funds to the Glide Foundation, a charity that provides food, health care, housing and job training for San Francisco’s homeless.

Over the last ten years, Buffett has netted $5.9 million in donations through such auctions.

Monday, January 29, 2007

Barbaro, winner of the 2006 Kentucky Derby, was euthanized on the morning of January 29, according to co-owner Roy Jackson. Barbaro suffered a major injury to his right hind leg shortly after the start of the 2006 Preakness Stakes.

According to Jackson, “We just reached a point where it was going to be difficult for him to go on without pain. It was the right decision, it was the right thing to do. We said all along if there was a situation where it would become more difficult for him then it would be time.”

Barbaro’s right hind leg was shattered in the opening lengths of the Preakness race. Three bones in the leg were broken – the cannon bone, the sesamoid bone, and the pastern bone. Laminitis took hold in the left hind leg as a result of the extra weight borne on the leg by the horse. It appeared for a while that Barbaro would recover; however, earlier this month, the horse suffered two significant setbacks that greatly reduced his ultimate chances for survival.

The three-year-old colt underwent emergency surgery on May 20 to fuse two joints in the damaged right leg. Further surgery was required on January 27 to insert two steel pins into one of the healed bones. The latest procedure was especially risky because it because it transferred more weight on to the leg, with the foot resting on the ground not bearing any weight. The right rear hoof was already deteriorating, having developed a painful abscess earlier in the week.

Monday, February 18, 2013

Venezuela’s government has opened a granite processing plant in the state of Bolívar, with the intention of providing about 25% of the granite required nationwide.

Ricardo Menéndez, vice president of the Productive Economic Area, said Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has yearned for the creation of this project to empower Venezuelan construction. Granito Bolívar is reportedly the most modern Venezuelan granite plant, not consuming community water or electricity, and is also the largest, with a daily capacity to supply enough material for use in construction of about 820 houses.

Menéndez said, “These granite blocks are the natural resources of our country, are the wealth we have as a country and often [some] simply decided to remove this richness from our country and take them to other countries” ^{((es))Spanish language: ?Esos bloques de granito son la riquezas naturales de nuestro país, son las riquezas que tenemos como patria y que muchas veces sencillamente esas riquezas decidieron sacarlas de nuestro territorio nacional y llevarlas a otros países}.

According to Menéndez, with the help of a state plan, Venezuela intends to exploit its 40,000 million cubic meters or more of granite reserves, generating a set of factories. “[T]he central theme is that these plants, all these factories, are for the construction of socialism; that means using our potential, develop the value chain within the country and of course that yields benefits from the point of view of the production system’s organization…. [Granito] Bolívar is not only the vision that historically we had of exposing richness, but the industries, basic industries we have, that level of our workers in the basic industries and in addition the development of the potential we have in the state” ^{((es))Spanish language: ?el tema central es que estas plantas todas estas fábricas son para la construcción del socialismo, eso significa utilizar nuestras potencialidades, dessarrollar la cadena de valor dentro del país y por supuesto que eso genere beneficios desde el punto de vista de la organización del sistema productivo … Bolívar no solamente es la visión que históricamente se tuvo de exponer las riquezas, sino que son las empresas, las empresas básicas que tenemos, ese nivel de nuestros trabajadores de la empresas básicas y adicionalmente el desarrollo del potencial que tenemos en el estado}.

For the construction of the plant, supplied by 23 quarries, the government of Bolívar provided about 30 million bolívares (US$4.7 million) and the national government €2.3 million (US$3 million). Bolívar reportedly has reserves of about 40,000 million tons of red, black, pink and white granite, sufficient for domestic demand for 200 years.

Thursday, October 4, 2007

Larry Stevens is running for the Libertarian Party in the Ontario provincial election, in the Kitchener-Conestoga riding. Wikinews’ Nick Moreau interviewed him regarding his values, his experience, and his campaign.

Stay tuned for further interviews; every candidate from every party is eligible, and will be contacted. Expect interviews from Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, New Democratic Party members, Ontario Greens, as well as members from the Family Coalition, Freedom, Communist, Libertarian, and Confederation of Regions parties, as well as independents.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

A team of eight transplant surgeons in Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, USA, led by reconstructive surgeon Dr. Maria Siemionow, age 58, have successfully performed the first almost total face transplant in the US, and the fourth globally, on a woman so horribly disfigured due to trauma, that cost her an eye. Two weeks ago Dr. Siemionow, in a 23-hour marathon surgery, replaced 80 percent of her face, by transplanting or grafting bone, nerve, blood vessels, muscles and skin harvested from a female donor’s cadaver.

The Clinic surgeons, in Wednesday’s news conference, described the details of the transplant but upon request, the team did not publish her name, age and cause of injury nor the donor’s identity. The patient’s family desired the reason for her transplant to remain confidential. The Los Angeles Times reported that the patient “had no upper jaw, nose, cheeks or lower eyelids and was unable to eat, talk, smile, smell or breathe on her own.” The clinic’s dermatology and plastic surgery chair, Francis Papay, described the nine hours phase of the procedure: “We transferred the skin, all the facial muscles in the upper face and mid-face, the upper lip, all of the nose, most of the sinuses around the nose, the upper jaw including the teeth, the facial nerve.” Thereafter, another team spent three hours sewing the woman’s blood vessels to that of the donor’s face to restore blood circulation, making the graft a success.

The New York Times reported that “three partial face transplants have been performed since 2005, two in France and one in China, all using facial tissue from a dead donor with permission from their families.” “Only the forehead, upper eyelids, lower lip, lower teeth and jaw are hers, the rest of her face comes from a cadaver; she could not eat on her own or breathe without a hole in her windpipe. About 77 square inches of tissue were transplanted from the donor,” it further described the details of the medical marvel. The patient, however, must take lifetime immunosuppressive drugs, also called antirejection drugs, which do not guarantee success. The transplant team said that in case of failure, it would replace the part with a skin graft taken from her own body.

Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital surgeon praised the recent medical development. “There are patients who can benefit tremendously from this. It’s great that it happened,” he said.

Leading bioethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania withheld judgment on the Cleveland transplant amid grave concerns on the post-operation results. “The biggest ethical problem is dealing with failure — if your face rejects. It would be a living hell. If your face is falling off and you can’t eat and you can’t breathe and you’re suffering in a terrible manner that can’t be reversed, you need to put on the table assistance in dying. There are patients who can benefit tremendously from this. It’s great that it happened,” he said.

Dr Alex Clarke, of the Royal Free Hospital had praised the Clinic for its contribution to medicine. “It is a real step forward for people who have severe disfigurement and this operation has been done by a team who have really prepared and worked towards this for a number of years. These transplants have proven that the technical difficulties can be overcome and psychologically the patients are doing well. They have all have reacted positively and have begun to do things they were not able to before. All the things people thought were barriers to this kind of operations have been overcome,” she said.

The first partial face transplant surgery on a living human was performed on Isabelle Dinoire on November 27 2005, when she was 38, by Professor Bernard Devauchelle, assisted by Professor Jean-Michel Dubernard in Amiens, France. Her Labrador dog mauled her in May 2005. A triangle of face tissue including the nose and mouth was taken from a brain-dead female donor and grafted onto the patient. Scientists elsewhere have performed scalp and ear transplants. However, the claim is the first for a mouth and nose transplant. Experts say the mouth and nose are the most difficult parts of the face to transplant.

In 2004, the same Cleveland Clinic, became the first institution to approve this surgery and test it on cadavers. In October 2006, surgeon Peter Butler at London‘s Royal Free Hospital in the UK was given permission by the NHS ethics board to carry out a full face transplant. His team will select four adult patients (children cannot be selected due to concerns over consent), with operations being carried out at six month intervals. In March 2008, the treatment of 30-year-old neurofibromatosis victim Pascal Coler of France ended after having received what his doctors call the worlds first successful full face transplant.

Ethical concerns, psychological impact, problems relating to immunosuppression and consequences of technical failure have prevented teams from performing face transplant operations in the past, even though it has been technically possible to carry out such procedures for years.

Mr Iain Hutchison, of Barts and the London Hospital, warned of several problems with face transplants, such as blood vessels in the donated tissue clotting and immunosuppressants failing or increasing the patient’s risk of cancer. He also pointed out ethical issues with the fact that the procedure requires a “beating heart donor”. The transplant is carried out while the donor is brain dead, but still alive by use of a ventilator.

According to Stephen Wigmore, chair of British Transplantation Society’s ethics committee, it is unknown to what extent facial expressions will function in the long term. He said that it is not certain whether a patient could be left worse off in the case of a face transplant failing.

Mr Michael Earley, a member of the Royal College of Surgeon‘s facial transplantation working party, commented that if successful, the transplant would be “a major breakthrough in facial reconstruction” and “a major step forward for the facially disfigured.”

In Wednesday’s conference, Siemionow said “we know that there are so many patients there in their homes where they are hiding from society because they are afraid to walk to the grocery stores, they are afraid to go the the street.” “Our patient was called names and was humiliated. We very much hope that for this very special group of patients there is a hope that someday they will be able to go comfortably from their houses and enjoy the things we take for granted,” she added.

In response to the medical breakthrough, a British medical group led by Royal Free Hospital’s lead surgeon Dr Peter Butler, said they will finish the world’s first full face transplant within a year. “We hope to make an announcement about a full-face operation in the next 12 months. This latest operation shows how facial transplantation can help a particular group of the most severely facially injured people. These are people who would otherwise live a terrible twilight life, shut away from public gaze,” he said.