Creating, collecting, and sharing thoughts and ideas. And learning along the way.
FANtastic new project by Google. Click on the link below the YT video for the full article in The Washington Post today.
Unfortunately, the Louvre in Paris is not part of the project, so you’ll just have to go there yourself to see the mysterious smile of the Mona Lisa. I made that trip four summers ago! If you’ve been already, that’s very cool. If you haven’t, here she is!
I stand amazed and in awe of this man!
Healthcare, Education overseas and in the U.S. and Agricultural investments are the focus of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Bill Gates has released his 2011 Annual Letter on behalf of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, drawing attention to seven ambitious social good initiatives. Gates stresses the need for renewed investment in foreign aid even as international budgets struggle against cuts and deficits.
Gates positions himself as a representative for the world’s poorest, those who will not have a chance to lobby governments for support, writing: “Whether you believe it a moral imperative or in the rich world’s enlightened self-interest, securing the conditions that will lead to a healthy, prosperous future for everyone is a goal I believe we all share.”
The open letter, which can be found here, identifies seven key areas the Foundation will focus on in the coming year.
The greatest priority, Gates says, is ending polio. Since hitting its peak in the U.S. in 1952, the number of cases has gone down 99%; now, there are less than 1,500 known cases of polio worldwide. There are just four countries where polio transmission has not been stopped: India, Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan. While these numbers have been dropping, Gates says the majority of outbreaks in 2010 were actually in countries that had been polio-free. The virus travelled back across borders into countries like Tajikistan and Congo.
Eradicating polio by investing in vaccines, Gates writes, could prevent polio-related deaths, eliminate costs for treating the disease in future years, and provide an example that dangerous diseases can be stopped. Gates says that by scaling the amount of polio vaccines — just $0.13 per dose — in the affected countries, we could save 3 million lives and $2.9 billion in treatment costs during the next decade.
“In the same way that during my Microsoft career I talked about the magic of software, I now spend my time talking about the magic of vaccines,” his letter says.
Other areas covered in the letter include the fight against malaria. The death toll from the illness dropped by 26% between 2000 and 2009, and Turkmenistan and Morocco were recently declared malaria-free.
Gates is also committed to saving the youngest children, claiming that 40% of the 8.1 million deaths per year of children under age five, happen in the first 28 days of life or the neonatal period.
HIV/AIDS continues to be a problem despite the fact that the number of people dying from AIDS has gone down by more than 20% in the last five years, to less than 2 million people annually. However, Gates is pushing for better results, writing: “Given all the lives that are at stake, I am impatient enough about this that I am willing to be viewed as a troublemaker by people who are happy with the status quo.”
Investment in agriculture, specifically for developing nations, is also one way to cut down on poverty and hunger. Gates writes that investments in seed, training, access to markets and innovative agricultural policy are already making a real difference worldwide.
In the U.S., the foundation’s biggest investments are in education. Improved teaching was highlighted as a way to enhance the country’s lagging international scores in mathematics, reading and science. According to the OECD PISA 2009 database, the U.S. was ranked behind at least 16 other countries in each category. Americans were significantly below average in their math scores compared to residents of other countries like Germany and Slovenia.
Gates aims to improve teaching standards by gathering high-quality feedback from peer reviews and video tapes while rewarding excellent teachers and learning from their example. Technology is also playing a role as seen in Sal Khan’s online school, Khan Academy, which uses online exercises to diagnose students’ weak spots and also uses online dashboards to help other teachers work with the site in their own classrooms.
Lastly, Gates mentions the giving pledge, an individual commitment to give away a majority of one’s wealth during one’s life or through one’s will. While the current roster of 58 pledgees skews towards the enormously wealthy, Gates insists it was more about fostering the drive to give back, regardless of personal wealth or geographical location.
For more information, you can check out Gatesnotes.com, or join the fight to end polio here. And let us know what you think of the initiatives: Are Gates and the foundation heading down the right path? Sound off in the comments below.
They’re audio-tweeting in Egypt! Yeah! (Sandeep, get on this bandwagon, quick!)
“And the number is growing,” he said, raising his voice to be heard on the recording.
Unedited, raw, anonymous and emotional, Egyptian voices are trickling out through a new channel that evades attempts by the authorities to suppress them by cutting Internet services.
A new social media link that marries Google, Twitter and Saynow, the voice-based social media platform, gives Egyptians three phone numbers to call and leave a voicemail, which is then sent out as a recorded Twitter message. The messages are at twitter.com/speak2tweet.
The result is a story of a revolution unfolding in short bursts. Sometimes speaking for just several seconds, other times for more than a minute, the disembodied voices convey highly charged moments of excitement or calm declarations of what life is like in the Arab world’s most populous country as it seeks to overturn the rule of its leader.
The messages rolled out as Egyptians seemed to be approaching a crucial point with hundreds of thousands of people crammed into central Cairo on Tuesday as protests continued to demand the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.
Protesters have sought to use social media like Facebook and Twitter to muster momentum for attendance at demonstrations even as the Egyptian authorities have shut off Internet access.
“Urgent news,” one man said. “The police have changed to serve the people. We are very happy.”
On speak2tweet it was not immediately clear whether all of the callers were phoning from inside the country. But support for the uprising in Egypt crossed borders.
“I live in Jordan,” said one man, urging on the demonstrators in a crackly recording. “I want to congratulate Egyptians on their popular revolution.”
Another man, speaking for several seconds, introduced himself as an Egyptian engineer named Wael. Without a trace of irony in a message that could potentially be heard by millions, he voiced dismay over cuts in the Internet.
But no Internet connection is needed for speak2tweet, the developers said in a statement on Monday. The numbers to call to leave messages can also be used to hear them. The numbers are +16504194196; +390662207294; or +97316199855. The service will instantly send the recorded call as a Twitter message using the hashtag #egypt.
“Like many people, we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground,” said a joint statement on Monday posted by Ujjwal Singh, the co-founder of SayNow and AbdelKarim Mardini, Google’s product manager for the Middle East and North Africa.
“Over the weekend, we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service — the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection,” the statement said. “We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there.”
This is how the winter season ought be received: the way Vivaldi conceives and composes it in his Four Seasons.
This set of music was published as the first four concertos in a collection of twelve, Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione, Opus 8, published in Amsterdam by Le Cène in 1725 by Antonio Lucio Vivaldi (March 4, 1678 – July 28, 1741), nicknamed il Prete Rosso (The Red Priest).
So, for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere bracing for the big blizzard that is coming our way later today, play some Vivaldi, especially this Winter concerto and celebrate the beauty of this season!
I had recently put up a lovely post on all things quiche: the lovely delicate pastry shells, both regular and mini size that contain all sorts of fillings.
Well, this is no quiche, but it sure looks like one. It could be called a frittata of sorts, but it contains no potatoes. And it’s certainly not a quiche because there’s no pastry holding its contents.
What it is, is a stand-alone omelette. Only it’s cooked on a stove-top but on so low a flame and with a covered lid that the egg mixture sets beautifully. Also, the onions, tomatoes, green chillies and cilantro are finely chopped and sauteed first, folded into the frothy beaten eggs, and then transferred into a sturdy pan.
What you’ll have fifteen minutes later is a gorgeous omelette that looks like a quiche or a pie. Ideally, there must be nothing sticking to the bottom and it ought to slide off onto a plate with ease, or at the very least must be able to cut firmly into wedges or squares.
Serve with toast, pitas or rotis. Makes a hearty entree any day. This was my slice from last evening. There were three more where that came from, BTW!
