You can also watch this video by clicking HERE or on the Play Button
Let's describe the tree
1 - Location
2 - Height
3 - Weight
4 - Gold value
5 - Total cost
1 - Location
2 - Height
3 - Weight
4 - Gold value
5 - Total cost
11/28/2011
A good Beaujolais? (video)
You can also watch this video by clicking HERE or on the Play Button
After watching the video at least twice, how many of the following questions can you answer?
- How old is it?
- When does it take place?
- Where does it take place??
- What time does it take place??
- What does it take place for?
- What is this year's result?
- Why is this year's result different?
Vending machine offers DIY banners at Dutch airport
Amsterdam's Schiphol airport has the world's first vending machine capable of printing out personalized giant canvas banners in just a few minutes.
You can pick your message, whether that is "Missed you Mummy," "I love you," "Will you marry me?" or anything else that makes you stand out from the crowd, choose the font and background design, pay between four and 15 euros ($19.98) depending on the length of the banner, and hit the button.
"We came up with the idea because when we were at the airport we saw all these people welcoming their friends and family with their own banners made of bed sheets and we thought what a hassle using sheets, wouldn't it just be easier to make the banner at the airport?" BannerXpress's co-founder Thibaud Bruna told Reuters Thursday.
Bruna's first machine, which was three years in the making, made its debut at Schiphol airport on Thursday. If the waterproof banners prove popular, he hopes to install the vending machines in other locations.
"We hope have them in other airports, but also in stadiums for sporting and music events," Bruna said.
Photos: Paul Vreeder - United Photos
edited from Reuters
11/24/2011
11/20/2011
"Exam Hell" in Korea
By Christine Kim and Ju-min Park(Reuters) - On Thursday 690,000 students from South Korea will take the annual exams that could lead them to one of the country's top universities and eventually a good job for life.
Temples and churches across Korea will be jammed with mothers fervently praying this week, not for salvation, but for their children’s success in the National College Entrance Exam..
The experience of preparing for and taking the exam, commonly call “exam hell” in Korea, is a central part of Korea’s educational system. For three years of their lives, the central focus of all high students in Korea is that one day in November. What happens that day determines which college they will enter, which in turn determines their future beyond what they do once they get into college.
One of the little jokes of life in Korea is that college is widely considered a four-year break between Korea’s grueling secondary school system and grinding work culture.
" I have been so stressed! I haven't allowed guests into my home recently because of superstitions against strangers," said Kwon Jeong-hee, whose son is taking the so-called CSAT tests for the second time.
The exams are a major event here, and society tries to make things easier for stressed students.
During oral tests, aircraft will not take off and land, and drivers will not sound their horns.
Police vehicles will escort late-running students to the exam rooms. Even the stock exchange will open an hour late to reduce traffic jams.
A nation
al scandal erupted in 2004 when a group of students were caught cheating with cell phones and working as a network. So serious is the exam that the offending students were handed down suspended sentences in court a few months later.Test supervisors get special training and during the exam, they are not allowed to cough, chew gum or put on strong perfume that might distract students.
With high levels of youth unemployment and a growing informal employment sector that doesn't bring the same benefits as working for huge South Korean conglomerates that offer a steady job and pension, anxious prayers from parents don't always stop when the exams are finished.
"My son took the CSAT more than a decade ago, I'm here to get him a job" said a mother at Jogyesa Buddhist temple in downtown Seoul, which has held special meetings for anxious parents who have been praying for weeks, if not months.
Adapted from Reuters
The hidden beauty of pollination (video)
Pollination is vital to life on Earth, but largely unseen by the human eye. Filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg shows us the intricate world of pollen and pollinators with gorgeous high-speed images from his film "Wings of Life," inspired by the vanishing of one of nature's primary pollinators, the honeybee.
You can also watch this video by clicking HERE or on the Play Button
You can also watch this video by clicking HERE or on the Play Button
11/18/2011
Benetton withdraws Pope-Imam kiss ad
Photo: AFP A Benetton clothing store window in Paris is covered by posters showing Pope Benedict XVI kissing Egypt's Ahmed el Tayyeb and US president Barack Obama kissing his China's Hu Jintao, November 17, 2011.
Italian clothing manufacturer Benetton has withdrawn a controversial ad showing Pope Benedict kissing a leading Islamic leader.
The Vatican has said it will take legal action in connection with the ad, unveiled Wednesday and yanked shortly thereafter.
The photo was one of a series of artificially created pictures in a campaign named "Unhate." Other photos depict the North and South Korean leaders kissing, and lip locks between the leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, as well as U.S. President Barack Obama and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
The Vatican called the picture of the pope kissing Sheik Ahmed Mohamed el-Tayeb a "totally unacceptable" show of "grave disrespect."
The Obama administration also spoke out against the ads. A presidential spokesman said Thursday that the White House disapproves of using the president's name and likeness for commercial purposes.
Benetton said the campaign was meant "solely to combat the culture of hatred in all its forms."
11/14/2011
11/06/2011
Reinventing Post Offices in a Digital World
Benjamin Kilb for The New York Times - The German postal service has few stand-alone branches now, having sold almost all of its 29,000 buildings. Most branches are in other businesses, like this convenience store in Barmen. DÜSSELDORF, Germany — The Deutsche Post office across from the train station here offers DVDs, umbrellas, phone cards and toys — with the processing of mail appearing nearly an afterthought. And the facility housing it is not a post office at all. Deutsche Post occupies a corner space in a bank.
With mail volumes decreasing 1 to 2 percent annually in many countries, European postal services from Germany to Sweden to Switzerland have reinvented themselves over the past decade as multifaceted delivery and information companies tailored to the virtual age. Though Deutsche Post by law still delivers to every address six days a week, it has jettisoned tens of thousands of buildings, 100,000 positions and its traditional focus on paper mail.
“We realized that being a national postal provider was an endangered business, that we had to redefine the role of postal providers in a digital world,” said Clemens Beckmann, executive vice president of innovation of the German post office’s mail division.
With the United States Postal Service facing insolvency, and one of the postal workers’ unions hiring consultants on business restructuring, it is looking toward Europe for new operating models, even though American legislation currently precludes adapting some of those innovations.
After selling off all but 24 of 29,000 post office buildings in the past 15 years, the German postal service is now housed mostly within other business “partners,” including banks, convenience stores and even private homes. In rural areas, a shopkeeper or even a centrally located homeowner is given a sign and deputized as a part-time postmaster.
At the same time, many European postal services, including the one here, have developed a host of electronic services that are increasingly making traditional post offices and mailboxes obsolete. Bills and catalogs can go first to digital mailboxes run by the post office on customers’ computers, and the customers can tell the post office what they want it to print and deliver. And while Americans are asked to send in suggestions for what celebrity should grace the next stamp, Germans can buy virtual postage from their cellphones.
Deutsche Post has expanded package delivery networks to profit from the uptick in online shopping and has also progressively expanded its offerings into completely new areas, like running online marketplaces similar to eBay for freelance writers.
Instead of watching its business be eroded by more aggressive marketplace competitors, as has happened in the United States, Deutsche Post completed its purchase of the logistics company DHL in 2002, meaning many Americans have been customers of the German post office.
European postal services vary widely in their degree of adaptation to the digital age. “But the U.S.P.S. is probably the best example of a pure monopoly that has seen the least change,” said John Payne, the chief executive of Zumbox, a Los Angeles-based start-up that offers virtual mailboxes for personal computers in the United States on a private basis and that has sold the program to foreign postal services.
Mr. Payne, who describes himself as a postal geek, has empathy for the failing postal service for all the regulation it must abide, including not being able to close an outpost “solely for operating at a deficit.”
He said: “It’s easy to say that the U.S.P.S. is a bunch of morons, but they live under legislative restrictions on what businesses they can enter and are expressly prevented from entering business unless it’s related to physical mail.”
To close a projected $9 billion budget gap, the United States Postal Service has proposed eliminating 3,700 of its 36,000 post offices and is selling off historic buildings that have anchored towns across America. The 17,000-square-foot neoclassical landmark post office in downtown Greenwich, Conn., was recently sold to a developer who plans to turn it into upscale retail space, perhaps a Bergdorf Goodman. Meanwhile, the post office will move to a former pet supply store.
European postal services started to think about new business models in the 1990s, when the European Commission opened up postal monopolies to competition and liberalized regulation. But the subsequent changes have come in response to declining mail volumes and, to a lesser extent, pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
While Deutsche Post was an owner of 29,000 post offices in 1990, it is now largely a tenant, with tens of thousands of counters lodged in other businesses. Outsourcing has allowed it to trim staff.
After Deutsche Post closed the post office in the village of Dorn-Assenheim seven years ago, it hired Renate Weitz, a retiree, to dispense postal services from her house each morning — though it now has plans to close that “branch” as well. In Schmitten (population 10,000), Jens Kinkel took over postal tasks at his stationery store. “I run the post office to get more customers,” Mr. Kinkel said. “Most buy stamps or envelopes and grab a paper as well.”
Dr. Julia Neu, a professor of sociology at the Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences, said the loss of post offices had been particularly painful for older people in the former East Germany, where they doubled as meeting places. “A lack of post offices is mostly dealt with by people helping each other by sharing cars or dropping off mail for the ones who aren’t mobile,” she said.
But over all, advocates say, the expansion into virtual services has improved customer satisfaction, saved money and helped reduce carbon emissions.
Virtual mailboxes can receive, store and organize years of bills, sparing digital customers the need to check one by one the Web sites of credit card companies and cellphone providers, for example. While this free service was slow to catch on in Sweden, membership has spiked in the past year, said Anders Asberg, head of product and market development for the Swedish post office. For actual packages, Deutsche Post customers can choose to pick up items at automated banks of lockers in places like train stations; the locker number and opening code are sent to their cellphones. Posten, the Swedish post office, allows vacationers to transmit cellphone photographs that Posten prints as postcards and delivers as physical mail.
Surprisingly, perhaps, new postal models have not meant the end of direct marketing (a k a junk mail), a lucrative business — though executives say such promotional material will be increasingly likely to arrive via computers and cellphones. PostNord — an umbrella company that includes both the Danish and Swedish postal services — now even helps smaller companies develop direct marketing campaigns through its “Advertising Planner,” which boasts: “It’s just as natural for PostNord to ensure that your offer reaches the right customer at the right time via satellite and cyberspace as via a traditional postman.”
adapted from The New York Times
11/05/2011
11/04/2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)