Saturday, May 20, 2006

The Iraqi parliament approves the new government – the first first full-term government since the US-led invasion in 2003 – consisting of 37 ministers which now holds members from Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni sects including Foreign Minister Hoshivar Zebari (Kurd), Deputy Prime Minister Salam Zaubai (Sunni) and Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani (Shia).

Due to disagreements the positions for the Interior, National Security and Defence Minister roles have been left vacant. For now the new Prime Minister, Nouri Maliki (Shia) is also taking the role of Interior Minister while Sunni Deputy Prime Minister Salam Zaubi will take the role of Defence Minister. Kurdish Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh has taken the role of acting National Security Minister. The mixed Cabinet of Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish sects also includes two women, the Human Rights Minister Wijdan Mikaeil and Women’s Affairs Minister Fatin Abdel-Rahman.

Several members of the Sunni factions led a walk-out before the approval of the new Cabinet after their proposal to postpone the event was turned down.

Mr Maliki hopes that people not associated with any or Iraq’s militia groups will fill these positions.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair so far has hailed the progress as “a very, very crucial change in Iraq”. The news has also prompted a response from the new Italian Prime Minister – “Italy supports Iraq in this direction”, Romano Prodi, Italian Prime Minister – after Mr Romano said he would propose the withdrawal of Italy’s 2,600 troops in Iraq.

In the following speech to the 275-seat assembly by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki announced that his government will focus on the issues of stability and security by working with the occupying forces, putting in place new laws to break up militias and integrate them into the federal forces. In his speech Mr. Maliki also mentioned other issues such as terrorism and “an objective timetable” for multinational forces to leave Iraq.

There are mixed feelings about whether the formation of the new government can bring peace amongst the religious factions. Many people hope however that these are the first steps to quell the resent escalating sectarian violence that has spread across the country. Some of the recent violence includes a bomb blast in a predominately Shia precinct of Baghdad, a suicide bomb attack on a police station in Qaim and numerous accounts of dumped bodies bearing evidence of torture and execution. Hundreds of people have been killed and even more have fled their homes since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in February 2006 in fear of more sectarian violence.

Sunni politicians have made allegations that death squads are operating as part of the security forces and are to blame for many of the killings.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

The mystery of the location of a viewpoint used by English painter John Constable has been solved, after nearly 200 years. The Stour Valley and Dedham Church was painted in Suffolk, England, between 1814 and 1815, but changes to the landscape meant that the spot he chose was not known, despite the best efforts of historians and art experts.

Now the puzzle has been answered. Martin Atkinson, who works for the National Trust as property manager for East Suffolk, used clues from the painting and looked at old maps to track down the viewpoint. Trees had grown, a hedgerow had been planted and boundaries had moved or disappeared, but Atkinson eventually worked out where Constable had stood. He said, “When I discovered that I had worked out the location where Constable painted this particular masterpiece, I couldn’t believe it. All the pieces of the jigsaw finally fitted together.”

Atkinson used an 1817 map of East Bergholt, where Constable grew up, as a reference point, but found that the view would have changed not long after the painting was completed. “The foreground didn’t fit at all, it was quite unusual as we know Constable painted it in the open air so he would have been standing in the scene. The hedgerow in his work no longer exists and there’s another hedgerow that runs across the scene today which wasn’t there. When you stand on the road on which he would have stood, and use the oak tree as a reference point, you see the same view. It’s great to see where an old master stood – and be inspired by the same view,” he said.

Suffolk, where Constable painted many of his finest paintings, is often called “Constable country”. Most, but not all, of the locations that Constable depicted are known. The picture is now housed in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts.

Thursday, July 5, 2007

At least five to ten police officers in Afghanistan have been killed and at least 11 others were wounded after a suicide bombing in the southern part of the country in the town of Spin Boldak at a checkpoint.

Police officers were having lunch inside a room at the checkpoint when the bomber, who was also dressed in a police officer’s uniform, walked in and detonated his explosives. At least two rooms were destroyed, according to police.

“We were eating lunch around 1330, when a suicide attacker wearing police uniform entered the post and blew himself up,” said Bismillah Khan, commander of the local police in Spin Boldak who could only confirm that “five border police are killed and 11 are injured.”

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Encyclopædia Britannica (EB), the authoritative reference book first published in 1768, is planning to let readers edit its entries, Jorge Cauz, its president said Friday, as it battles to keep pace with online Internet encyclopedia projects like Wikipedia.

Starting next week, readers, visitors and contributing experts to EB’s free, online version, Britannica.com, will be allowed to submit proposed changes and contributions to Britannica editors, who will then review the edits and make the necessary alterations. This move is meant to let readers help keep the reference work up-to-date by collaboration.

In expanding and maintaining entries online, users whose editorial suggestions are accepted and published entirely or in part will be credited by name in the section of the article that lists contributors.

The new website features will be available on the site within the next twenty-four hours. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, “Cauz is promising a 20-minute turnover on these edits, but that number could go up dramatically if the company cannot anticipate a large influx of edits at once.”

Britannica, however, explained that it would not allow a Wikipedia form of editing which allows a wide range of users to make contributions. EB’s novel user choice will include enrollment of experts in a reward scheme and invitation of selected readers to contribute. Several readers will also be allowed to use Britannica materials to contribute their own articles that will be featured on the site.

“We are not abdicating our responsibility as publishers or burying it under the now-fashionable ‘wisdom of the crowds’,” wrote Jorge Cauz in his blog. “We believe that the creation and documentation of knowledge is a collaborative process but not a democratic one,” Cauz noted, explaining further that “these experts would sit alongside the encyclopaedia entries and the official material would carry a ‘Britannica Checked’ stamp, to distinguish it from the user-generated content.”

Cauz also announced the unveiling by Britannica of a beta (trial) version of what will become the finished Britannica Online website, which will include a re-design and the addition of web-based tools for readers and users to upload their own reference materials. The new features that Britannica will roll out over the next six months also include an article rating system and a comprehensive list of contributors by subject area.

Articles developed by Britannica’s own editors also appear in the printed volumes, which are published every two years, though material created by what Cauz called their “community of scholars” will only appear online.

“Wikipedia contributes to the spread of information and many people are happy with it as their only source of reference, as are many people happy to eat McDonald’s every day,” said Cauz, who discussed differences between Britannica and Wikipedia features of online editing. “That’s the last thing we want to be. We are a different type of animal, catering to a different type of crowd,” he added.

Cauz said the company will retain its staff of about 100 full-time editors and over 4,000 expert contributors. “I think the future is likely going to be that in every media segment there has to be a symbiotic relationship between editor and reader,” said Cauz, adding that each article will have a detailed history showing changes and who made them, as in Wikipedia. In 1933, Britannica became the first encyclopaedia to introduce a “continuous revision” policy, with continuous reprinting such that every article is updated on a regular schedule.

Unlike Wikipedia, which allows anonymous edits through a user’s IP address being logged, Britannica’s new features strictly require contributors or users to register, revealing their real names and addresses, prior to modifying or creating their own articles. Contributions from non-academic users will sit in a separate section.

A new or changed feature called “Suggest Edit” button will allow readers of a particular article to suggest information clarification, post questions to contributors or add to the existing text, subject to Britannica editors’ approval. “What we are trying to do is shifting … to a much more proactive role for the user and reader where the reader is not only going to learn from reading the article but by modifying the article and – importantly – by maybe creating his own content or her own content,” wrote Cauz.

Cauz faulted Google for setting Wikipedia higher in pagerank than Britannica. He explained that, in EB, new efforts to participate in online collaboration of encyclopedic content are deemed by recognizing experts as a requirement in order to achieve objectivity and high quality. During his tenure, officials from Britannica have become outspoken in their criticism of Wikipedia articles’ contents.

In July 2006, Cauz personally entered the fray in an interview in New Yorker Magazine, in which he stated that Wikipedia had “decline(d) into a hulking, mediocre mass of uneven, unreliable, and, many times, unreadable articles” and that “Wikipedia is to Britannica as American Idol is to the Juilliard School.”

The 241-year-old publication, Encyclopædia Britannica, is a general English-language encyclopaedia published by a privately held company, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., and is the oldest English-language encyclopaedia still in print. The Britannica articles are directed at educated adult readers. First published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh, Scotland, it quickly grew in popularity and size, with its third edition in 1801 reaching over 21 volumes.

Britannica’s latest 15th edition has a unique three-part structure: a 12-volume Micropædia of short articles (generally having fewer than 750 words), a 17-volume Macropædia of long articles (having from two to 310 pages) and a single Propædia volume created to give a hierarchical outline of human knowledge. The Micropædia is devised for quick fact-checking and as a door to the Macropædia.

At present, Britannica offers optical disc, online and mobile versions. The Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite 2006 DVD has over 55 million words and just over 100,000 articles, including 73,645 regular Britannica articles. The Encyclopædia Britannica Online website has more than 120,000 articles and is updated regularly. EB’s virtual space was founded in 1994 and contains articles comprised of over 46 million words.

In February 2007, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. said that it was working with AskMeNow to launch a mobile encyclopedia, to enable users to send questions via text messages. Replies would then be forwarded by AskMenow based on Britannicas’ articles.

As Britannica is a business, the company needed to charge, and Web access to the archives cost $70 a year. In April 2008, “Britannica Webshare,” a version of the online Encyclopaedia Britannica has been available for free, but only for Web publishers. The simple process requires signing up, giving a site URL, a description, and approval by the company. “This program is intended for people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers. We reserve the right to deny participation to anyone who in our judgment doesn’t qualify,” said TechCrunch.

In June 2008, Britannica announced an initiative to facilitate collaboration between online expert and amateur scholarly contributors for Britannica’s on-line content (in the spirit of a wiki), with editorial oversight from Britannica staff. According to its statement titled “Britannica’s New Site: More Participation, Collaboration from Experts and Readers,” approved contributions would be credited, though contributing automatically grants Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. perpetual, irrevocable license to those contributions.

PC World has, however, reported that it became clear how steep of a climb Britannica faces. “Wikipedia received a massive 97 percent share of the online encyclopedia market or visits U.S. Web surfers made to online encyclopedias last week,” Web monitoring company Hitwise said Friday. “MSN Encarta was second with 1.27 percent of visits, followed by Encyclopedia.com (0.76 percent), Fact Monster (0.72 percent) and, in fifth place, Britannica.com (0.57 percent). Britannica.com’s share of U.S. visits dropped 53 percent last month compared with December 2007,” Hitwise added.

While Britannica.com has 1.5 million visitors per day, Wikipedia attracts about six million, The Times reported. Hitwise also said that as of last week, Wikipedia ranked the 13th-most-visited site on the Web overall, while Britannica.com was 2,349th. The essential difference is Wikipedia does not charge any fee, while Britannica.com requires a paid subscription for access of some contents. Britannica, however, is issuing a “Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009 Ultimate Edition” – the £40 2009 DVD edition of its famous print encyclopaedia.

“One of the big questions still on the table is whether Britannica will open its content or maintain its premium membership paid wall. In order to compete with Wikipedia in the Google [search results], Britannica needs to build up inbound links. If content is locked up behind the paid content walls, people will be much more likely to link to other websites with free content — such as that available on Wikipedia,” Hitwise analyst Heather Hopkins noted.

Wikipedia, a not-for-profit collaborative online encyclopedia, in its Wikipedia Foundation’s recent drive for public donations, had aimed to raise $US6 million over the course of six months. On January 1, “it had met the target, from more than 125,000 donors,” said Wikipedia head honcho and co-founder Jimmy Wales. He has invoked Wikipedia’s “free-culture movement”, and its mission “to bring free knowledge to the planet, free of charge and free of advertising”.

“Wikipedia is the new frontier of human knowledge,” wrote Anonymous, donating $US100. American Patrick Culligan left another comment, saying, “Accurate information is what enables society to act in the appropriate way in which we can change the world. History cannot be left for the winners to write.” Another said: “Wikipedia is one of those ‘big ideas’ which will change our world for the better.”

After Encyclopedia Britannica’s announcement that it is introducing a more open editing system, web 2.0 giant Wikipedia has considered attempts to move away from its free and open editing system. Academics, scholars and others have long criticized the writing principles fostered by Wikipedia amid vandals having often changed Wikipedia entries resulting to erroneous reports.

Now, for the first time, the online encyclopedia has considered restricting the edits that users can make. The system known internally as “Flagged Revisions,” has been sparked off by inaccurate changes after a Wikipedia user “Gfdjklsdgiojksdkf” and an anonymous editor respectively edited articles to say that both U.S. Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Carlyle Byrd had died. The errors were caught and duly corrected after about five minutes, but they were up long enough for the Washington Post, among other media outlets, to notice.

In just the latest incidents in a long and rich history of vandalism since its 2001 launch, Vernon Kay and Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs, among others, have also been falsely reported as dead on Wikipedia. Wiki means “fast” in Hawaiian and it certainly is, even amid subtle vandalism, since anyone can amend its 2.7m entries. Wikipedia has long struggled with such prankery, and has ever since worked closely with its community to overcome it without adopting harsh protections.

As Wikipedia itself acknowledges, “Allowing anyone to edit Wikipedia means that it is more easily vandalized or susceptible to unchecked information, which requires removal.” In the proposed process, only registered or reliable users could have their material or edits immediately appear to the general public visiting Wikipedia. Other contributors’ edits or changes will first be reviewed, signed off, or “flagged” by reliable users.

“This nonsense would have been 100 percent prevented by Flagged Revisions,” said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales under the header “Why I Am Asking Flagged Revisions Be Turned On Now,” on his user page. “[Instances of misinformation] could […] have been prevented by protection or semi-protection, but [..] [many are] breaking news [stories] and we want people to be able to participate (so protection is out) and even to participate in good faith for the first time ever (so semi-protection is out),” explained Wales who calls for monitoring to prevent false entries.

Wales said that a poll revealed 60 percent of Wikipedians favored the new proposal and that it would be a “time limited test.” He noted that the delay should be less than the German Wikipedia allowed: “less than 1 week, hopefully a lot less, because we will only be using it on a subset of articles, the boundaries of which can be adjusted over time to manage the backlog.”

Wales issued a statement requesting implementation of the extension: “To the Wikimedia Foundation: per the poll of the English Wikipedia community and upon my personal recommendation, please turn on the flagged revisions feature as approved in the poll.” But the community response was further debate.

As of February 2, his request hasn’t been implemented.

Apparently the Wikipedia German edition has been using a form of the Flagged Revisions system since May as a test case. It has, however, led to a delay of up to three weeks in getting some new articles and edits published, for critics have said that the system is very labor intensive and comments can take weeks to appear. Wales, however, pointed out that the system he was proposing was only for biographies of living people. Wikipedia has provided comprehensive and up-to-minute entries on the Virginia Tech massacre in April 2007 and the Mumbai terrorist attacks this past November as the events were still taking place.

While some participants in the debate have argued that the rule change is unnecessary, some have described it in terms of an ethical imperative. As one administrator wrote: “In the vast majority of cases, a Wikipedia article on an individual will be the very highest-ranking search engine result when a search is conducted on the name of that person. This affects the lives of the people we write about on a daily basis. To suggest that Wikipedia does not have profound obligations to do its best to keep these articles free of defamatory, gossipy and privacy-invading material is to suggest that we are without obligation to consider the real-world impacts of our actions and the work we are doing.”

Others have argued that practical considerations should prevent a change that could result in a large backlog of unreviewed edits. “Flagged revisions will suffocate under its own weight,” claimed administrator DragonflySixtyseven. Still other Wikipedian editors further argue that the current system works just fine.

Some consider the split could ultimately threaten the future of the dominant online encyclopedia. “The big issue is that while we have majority support, we don’t have consensus, and that’s the way we have always made our decisions,” Jake Wartenberg user and member of RC patrol chimed in. “A lot of editors are becoming disenchanted with the project; we are losing them all the time,” he added. By way of reply, amidst the embarrassing debacle, Mr. Wales has reached out to help and offered a compromise, inviting the opposition to submit alternative suggestions until the 29th of January.

“Implementing this functionality is really a volunteer community decision. We know the discussion about flagged revs is still taking place on English Wikipedia, but at this stage, it appears the majority of the community are behind this decision. As that discussion unfolds, we’ll have a better sense of the timing,” Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation, in a rejoinder, wrote in his e-mail message, explaining the status of the proposed restriction.

“Now seems an excellent time for Wikipedia to pause and take stock. It has proved the surprising wisdom of crowds as well as their utter idiocy. Its challenge now is to harness the enthusiasm of those volunteers while becoming a more reliable, better written source. And at some point, surely, its founders might want to turn it into a commercial venture. As Samuel Johnson almost said: “No one but a blockhead ever edited, excepted for money,” said Iain Hollingshead, a British freelance journalist and novelist.

“The suggestion of increased moderation on Wikipedia would divide the community. The site has built its reputation on being ‘the encyclopedia that anyone can edit’. It’s less radical to be ‘the encyclopedia that anyone can edit as long as their edits are approved by a trusted Wikipedian’ but that’s what co-founder Jimmy Wales has suggested. Wikipedia’s openness is its strength,” said Shane Richmond of The Daily Telegraph, asking, “is it most valuable feature its openness or its accuracy?”

Wales’ position is that “I consider our BLP issue to be so important that I think it is actually unethical to not use a tool which holds great promise for helping with the problem, now that it has been successfully tested elsewhere. Anyone who would like to see this tool not go into practice needs to start by convincing people that either (a) it is OK for the BLP vandalism problem to continue or (b) there is a better way to solve it.”

Friday, July 18, 2008

For nearly half a century the world’s largest telescope, the Arecibo Observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, has been observing our solar system and the universe around it. Completed by Cornell University along with the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1963, Arecibo’s enormous size gives it the ability to collect more light than any other telescope, allowing it to observe objects that are too faint for other radio telescopes to see. Its main purposes are radio astronomy, aeronomy and radar astronomy, but is probably most famous for its continuing use to search for and attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life outside our solar system and beyond.

Now Arecibo is facing severe budget cuts which could ultimately close the facility. In an in depth exclusive report, Wikinews examined how much of the observatory’s budget was at risk, and what the possible outcomes could be for the programs currently relying on Arecibo as their main research tool. Wikinews spoke to several individuals closely affiliated with projects and facilities who use significant time at the observatory.

Currently, the NSF funds the operations of Arecibo with just over US$10 million every year. By 2011 they plan to drastically cut that funding to only $4 million a year, nearly 65% less than the current budget. To counter that loss, the United States House of Representatives passed a bill that would authorize NASA to spend at least 2 million dollars of their nearly $21 billion budget to fund portions of Arecibo until 2009. But that still leaves more than half of the loss to be recovered, and if something isn’t done soon the facility will be closed by 2011 — or sooner if additional cuts are made.

Arecibo is 305 meters in diameter and 300 meters tall at its highest point. It also has an on-site remote sensing LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) system to detect light and range of a given object in space. Construction began in 1960 and the observatory officially opened on November 1, 1963. Since then, several projects, programs and discoveries were made possible because of the telescope. Its platform also received a fresh coat of paint in late 2007, the first since it was built.

In 1989, the first images of an asteroid named 4769 Castalia were captured using Arecibo. In 1992 Aleksander Wolszczan, an astronomer from Poland used Arecibo to discover pulsar PSR B1257+12 which then led him to discover the first three extrasolar planets in history, and possibly a comet. Scientists with the Near Earth Object Program also use the observatory to track possible meteors and asteroids that have the potential to strike the Earth. Arecibo is also part of the Express Production Real-time e-VLBI Service (EXPReS) project which is aimed at connecting telescopes from Africa, Europe and North and South America to create a 6,000 mile wide telescope. This allows all connected telescopes to observe the exact same spot in the sky giving scientists images 100 times better than any single telescope on Earth. A successful test of this system was completed on May 22. The observatory was also featured in the movie Contact starring Jodie Foster and several James Bond films.

Perhaps the most well known use of Arecibo is its ongoing attempt to find and or communicate with extraterrestrial life. The popular distributed computing SETI@home project launched in 1999 (started by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley), uses Arecibo on a daily basis to record radio data. SETI@home users from around the world can then donate computer time to analyze the data for potential artificial signals, and maybe some day find a message from another intelligent civilization.

“If this occurs [budget cuts], all projects using Arecibo would stop, including uncompleted surveys looking for pulsars, mapping Galactic hydrogen and of course our SETI surveys (SETI@home and SERENDIP V),” stated Eric Korpela, the project scientist for SETI@home, to Wikinews. This would also include the NEO Program. Currently the NEO is mandated by Congress to keep a record of all near-Earth objects that are more than 1 kilometer in diameter.

According to Korpela, the cuts began several years ago when United States senators earmarked funds for other observatories located in West Virginia and New Mexico. He says that those actions “diverted money away from the rest of astronomy” causing the NSF to take the shortfall from the Arecibo budget.

“About two years ago, NSF decided that because of additional funding problems Arecibo wouldhave to close in 2011 with substantial budget cuts before then,” added Korpela who also said the he is sure that SETI@home and SERNDIP V could find an alternative science source, but nothing as powerful and as sensitive as Arecibo. Korpela also adds that there is not yet any planned move of SETI@home, and no agreements between them and other observatories.

“I’m certain the both SETI@home and SERENDIP V would find another telescope to use. But no other telescope comes close to the sensitivity of Arecibo, with the next largest telescopes having afactor of 10 less collecting area and therefore a factor of 10 less sensitivity. The same is true for the pulsar searches. For the hydrogen mapping Arecibo has 3 times the angular resolution of thenearest competitors,” added Korpela but also stated that “there currently aren’t any plans” to move SETI@home and that they don’t “have any agreements from any of the telescopes” to host SETI@home; there are several possible telescopes SETI@home could use adds Korpela.

“Of course we’d like the largest telescopes available if we could get them. Parkes (a 64m telescope in Australia) would be a good candidate. Effelsberg (a 100m dish in Germany) or the 100m Green Bank Telescope in the U.S. would also be good candidates, but as I said much discussion would need to take place before a change could happen,” said Korpela.

In June, former U.S. President Bill Clinton and his daughter Chelsea visited the observatory in an effort to bring awareness to the importance of Arecibo; he called the funding for the facility “gravely inadequate.” He also stated that his wife, and former 2008 U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, supports the need for “basic science”, and notes Hillary’s continued support for a defeated congressional bill that would have given Arecibo the funding it needed.

The bill, named H.R. 2862 ‘Departments of Commerce and Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill’, was rejected by the House of Representatives because “it exceed[ed] the President’s request by $1.4 billion.” The House stated that the need for more funding for the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was more important.

“The Administration shares the priority the Senate Committee affords basic research and fundamental science and education at NSF, but is concerned that the bill does not fully support the President’s request,” stated the bill which also added that “the Committee has identified areas, such as facilities oversight, that need increased investment to maintain NSF’s efficient operations” and that the NSF didn’t “provide [a] full request for salaries and expenses that would allow NSF to continue to perform to high standards.”

A new bill was then resubmitted and reintroduced as H.R. 3737 on October 3, 2007. It is specifically aimed at providing the “National Science Foundation and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) utilization of the Arecibo Observatory.”

“[This bill will] ensure that the Arecibo Observatory is fully funded to continue its research on Earth’s ionosphere, continue its research in radio astronomy, and continue research on the solar system; and coordinate with the Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to ensure that the capabilities of the Arecibo Observatory continue to be available for National Aeronautics and Space Administration research in characterizing and mitigating Near Earth Objects, and other research as needed,” states the Bill.

If Arecibo were to close, Korpela states that it would take only a short time for SETI@home to move its project elsewhere, but that any agreements made with other observatories will take a much longer time to work out. “Setting up the equipment at a new telescope would be a matter of days, arranging an agreement to do so would take much longer. If we can’t find an alternative telescope after an Arecibo shutdown, the project would end once the existing data was analyzed. We’re still hoping that Arecibo will be spared,” added Korpela. He calls for more support of bill H.R. 3737 to continue Arecibo’s science, and SETI@home urges individuals to write to Congress to show support for the bill.

As for the NEO Program, packing up and moving to another location is not possible. There are no other observatories sensitive or large enough to perform the task of tracking near-Earth objects, especially ones at great distances. If Arecibo were to close, the NEO Program, despite a U.S. Congressional mandate and recognition from the Astronomical Science Senior Review Committee, would come to a screeching halt. Wikinews contacted the NSF for a statement, but a Dan MacMillan directed us to the Committee’s report.

“The SR endorses its future discovery potential and archival value. The SR recognizes the significant and unique scientific contributions that the Arecibo Observatory has made to astronomy and astrophysics and it congratulates NAIC and Cornell on operating the facility so effectively,” said the Committee in a 94 page report on the NSF’s budget.

“However, the committee was not persuaded of the primacy of the science program beyond the end of the decade and found that the case for long term support at the present level was not as strong as that for other facilities. The SR recommends that NAIC plan either to close Arecibo or to operate it with a much smaller AST budget. The SR recommends closure after 2011 if the necessary support is not forthcoming. It recommends that operation of the Angel Ramos Visitor Center continue,” added the Committee which also said that “that there were no reliable de-commissioning estimates and recommends that AST engage an independent study to advise on the viability and cost of decommissioning the telescope.”

In an attempt to cover the budget shortfall Arecibo faces, Don Campbell, Professor of Astronomy at Cornell’s Department of Astronomy, who specializes in radio and radar astronomy, tells Wikinews that the university is looking at all possible sources of funding to keep Arecibo open.

“Cornell/NAIC is looking at all possibilities for raising the funds needed to keep the Observatory operating as a forefront institution for research in astronomy and atmospheric sciences. This includes funding from federal agencies, from within Puerto Rico, via international agreements and from private sources,” said Campbell who added that “the NSF’s Division of the Senior Review (SR) panel recommended that NAIC’s budget – NAIC is head quartered at Cornell University and manages the Arecibo – from NSF/AST be reduced from about $10.5M to $8M in FY 2010. It also recommended that there be a further 50% reduction in FY 2011 and that Cornell must find the additional funds needed to operate Arecibo from other sources.”

Campbell also adds that Arecibo is so unique and sensitive, closing it makes no sense.

“Closing Arecibo would be closing the world’s largest and most sensitive single dish radio telescope. It is 4 to 5 times more sensitive, and has a higher resolving power at the same frequencies, than the next largest single dish radio telescope, the 100 m Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope,” said Campbell.

“Arecibo is also, of course, the source of the data that is processed by all the volunteers working with the SETI@home project. Given its relatively small operating budget, closing Arecibo makes no sense,” added Campbell.

Thursday, July 20, 2006

Investigations are continuing at Alton Towers after a total of 29 people were injured on a roller-coaster.

Six people were taken to hospital after the accident at the UK’s most famous theme park. The front carriages of the Runaway Mine Train, which had 46 passengers on it at the time, became separated and subsequently crashed back into the rest of the ride at the Staffordshire theme park.

A Staffordshire Ambulance spokesman said two women, aged in their 30s or 40s, were flown by air ambulance to North Staffordshire Hospital suffering possible whiplash, spinal or abdominal injuries. A third woman was taken by land ambulance to the same hospital and a man is thought to have made his own way to a casualties centre in Leek. Two other people were taken to Accident and Emergency later, and the other people who were injured were treated for cuts and bruises on the premises.

The ride, which opened in 1990 and is one of Alton Towers oldest attractions, was immediately evacuated and closed to the public. Alton Towers and the Health and Safety Executive are investigating the incident which occurred at 11:00am local time on Thursday.

A spokeswoman for the theme park announced that “the ride has been closed and will remain so whilst a thorough investigation is carried out”. It is unclear how long the ride will be closed for, but the rest of the theme park will stay open.

On the Alton Towers website, customers are told the Runaway Mine Train lets them “rattle along the rickety rails and mine shafts, past trees and rivers, on a speeding locomotive that’s out of control – and getting faster every second” .

The roller coaster was manufactured by Mack Rides, and is situated in the Katanga Canyon area of the theme park. The train normally makes two circuits for each ride, but on quiet days, it has been known to make three.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

The mystery of the location of a viewpoint used by English painter John Constable has been solved, after nearly 200 years. The Stour Valley and Dedham Church was painted in Suffolk, England, between 1814 and 1815, but changes to the landscape meant that the spot he chose was not known, despite the best efforts of historians and art experts.

Now the puzzle has been answered. Martin Atkinson, who works for the National Trust as property manager for East Suffolk, used clues from the painting and looked at old maps to track down the viewpoint. Trees had grown, a hedgerow had been planted and boundaries had moved or disappeared, but Atkinson eventually worked out where Constable had stood. He said, “When I discovered that I had worked out the location where Constable painted this particular masterpiece, I couldn’t believe it. All the pieces of the jigsaw finally fitted together.”

Atkinson used an 1817 map of East Bergholt, where Constable grew up, as a reference point, but found that the view would have changed not long after the painting was completed. “The foreground didn’t fit at all, it was quite unusual as we know Constable painted it in the open air so he would have been standing in the scene. The hedgerow in his work no longer exists and there’s another hedgerow that runs across the scene today which wasn’t there. When you stand on the road on which he would have stood, and use the oak tree as a reference point, you see the same view. It’s great to see where an old master stood – and be inspired by the same view,” he said.

Suffolk, where Constable painted many of his finest paintings, is often called “Constable country”. Most, but not all, of the locations that Constable depicted are known. The picture is now housed in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts.

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