We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land by Jimmy Carter

President Carter has been a student of the biblical Holy Land all his life. For the last three decades, as president of the United States and as founder of The Carter Center, he has studied the complex and interrelated issues of the region's conflicts and has been actively involved in reconciling them. He knows the leaders of all factions in the region who will need to play key roles, and he sees encouraging signs among them. Carter describes the history of previous peace efforts and why they fell short. He argues persuasively that the road to a peace agreement is now open and that it has broad international and regional support. Most of all, since there will be no progress without courageous and sustained U.S. leadership, he says the time for progress is now. President Barack Obama is committed to a personal effort to exert that leadership, starting early in his administration. This is President Carter's call for action, and he lays out a practical and doable path to peace.

AT&T Named February 19 For Galaxy Note

Galaxy Note is coming to AT&T on February 19 with the price tag of $299.99. The two year’s contract is a must-thing for any customer who wants Note in his hands. Pre-orders will be under way from February 5.
Anybody who’s too excited to get the Galaxy Note before the announced date two days can be compensated (February 17) by AT&T if you pre-order by the 15^th February on the official site or at a retail store.
Sexy looking Galaxy Note is coming in carbon blue and ceramic white colors.

Source:etechmag.com

Facebook Addiction!Any Boundaries!?

Teens Break Into CNN Newsroom To Check Facebook 

Some people just have to feed their Facebook addiction, no matter what the cost.
Just ask two teens who were arrested at 3:30 a.m. Friday morning after breaking into the CNN Center in Atlanta, Ga., to check their profiles on the social networking site.
Aldayne Fearon, 18, and Francis Mutemwa, 17, allegedly climbed over a ledge from the neighboring Omni Hotel.
Once they gained access to CNN's newsroom on the fifth floor, they began working on two computers, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
"At the time of their arrest, they were checking their Facebook pages on those computers," Atlanta police spokeswoman Kim Jones told the paper.
Police charged the pair with criminal trespassing and each were held on $500 bail, 11 Alive news reported.

THAI Airways President asks PATA, "Make Visas Easier"

THAI Airways president, addressing the PATA Hub City Forum in Bangkok yesterday, asked the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) to help make it easier for Thai nationals to get tourism visas.

Addressing 120 public and private sector travel industry executives at the forum, THAI President, Piyasvasti Amranand, said that while e-visas were discussed at Davos, “There are many small things you can do today to help Thais travel to Europe.”

Piyasvasti praised destinations that had no visa or streamlined tourism visa facilities. “I think it’s why we see so many Thais now going to Korea... I think PATA should do more to get governments to ease the visa situation.”

Mind-Reading May Be Reality Soon

By looking only at maps of electrical activity in the human brain, scientists were able to tell which words a person was listening to. The discovery is a major step toward being able to “hear” the thoughts of people who can’t speak.
"If someone was completely paralyzed, or if a patient had locked-in syndrome with no movement, but the brain was still active and we could understand it well enough, we could develop devices to take advantage of that and restore communication," said Brian Pasley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
"It's still very early," he added. "And a lot of work still needs to be done."
For decades, scientists have been trying to understand how our brains manage to process audible sounds and extract abstract meaning from words and sentences. As part of that effort, lots of work on animals has helped narrow in on the brain regions involved in hearing and responding to sounds.

Incredible, Sci-Fi Railgun Takes Step Toward Reality

A theoretical dream for decades, the futuristic railgun -- which uses magnets to shoot bullets for hundreds of miles at speeds of up to Mach 7 -- just took another step toward reality.
Military supply company Raytheon announced Monday that it had been awarded a $10 million naval contract to develop a way to supply enough juice to power the whopping gun -- which could someday reshape naval warfare.
"This new system will dramatically change how our Navy defends itself and engages enemies while at sea," said Joe Biondi, vice president of advanced technology for Raytheon's Integrated Defense Systems business.
Rather than relying on a explosion to fire a projectile, the railgun uses an electomagnetic current to accelerate a non-explosive bullet at several times the speed of sound. The conductive projectile zips along a set of electrically charged parallel rails and out of the barrel at speeds up to Mach 7.
But it takes a heck of a lot of electricity to achieve such a velocity.

Full Story on Discovery 

Take Concussions Out of Play

Each year about 173,285 sports- and recreation-related TBIs, including concussions, among children and adolescents are treated in U.S. emergency departments.
A bump, blow, or jolt to the head can cause a concussion, a type of TBI. Concussions can also occur from a blow to the body that causes the head to move rapidly back and forth. Even a "ding," "getting your bell rung," or what seems to be mild bump or blow to the head can be serious.
Concussions can occur in any sport or recreation activity. So, all coaches, parents, and athletes need to learn concussion signs and symptoms and what to do if a concussion occurs. Every youth must learn to Prevent, Recognize, and Respond to Concussions

Male Mice have "Singing Voices"

Think twice the next time you call someone as quiet as a mouse—the rodents are actually sophisticated singers, a new study says.
For the first time, scientists caught wild male house mice and used digital audio software to examine the durations, pitches, and frequencies of their sounds.
The results revealed that the males’ songs are more complex than mere squeaks, and that each male has a different singing “voice.”
Scientists already knew that these melodious males sing when they smell a female, and that females are in turn attracted to their tunes. But the new research suggests it may be more complicated than that.
The research also showed that brothers’ sounds are similar to each other when compared with songs of unrelated males—possibly a strategy for females to discern males and avoid inbreeding, according to the study, published recently in the journals Physiology & Behavior and the Journal of Ethology.

Source:National Geographic

Matter from outside solar system detected

NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) has spotted material from outside our solar system.Researchers announced that this material came from elsewhere in the galaxy.

IBEX a spacecraft that is studying the edge of the solar system from its orbit about 200,000 miles above Earth.

Today in a news briefing at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C, the principal investigator David McComas said:
"This alien interstellar material is really the stuff that stars and planets and people are made of — it's really important to be measuring it"

Park by François Abélanet - Paris, France

This brilliant display of 3D landscape art was conceived by Mr. François Abélanet, and it took the labor and dedication of nearly a hundred participants, over the course of five days. Its stands across an impressive span of nearly 100 metres, square volume near 1,500 metres, and hundreds of cubic meters of lawn, sedum and straw. It’s sitting next the City Hall in Paris (in from of the Hotel de Ville), where it will remain until the 15th of July. Too bad this is just a temporary installation! The city of lights would not be the least bit slighted by keeping such an impressive artwork in its streets.

Schindler's List (1993)

Schindler's List is a 1993 film about Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved the lives of more than a thousand mostly Polish-Jewish refugees during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories. The film was directed by Steven Spielberg, and based on the novel Schindler's Ark by Australian novelist Thomas Keneally. It stars Liam Neeson as Schindler, Ralph Fiennes as Schutzstaffel (SS)-officer Amon Göth, and Ben Kingsley as Schindler's Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern.

The film was a box office success and recipient of seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Score, as well as numerous other awards (7 BAFTAs, 3 Golden Globes). In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked the film 8th on its list of the 100 best American films of all time (up one position from its 9th place listing on the 1998 list).

The film begins in 1939 with the German-initiated relocation of Polish Jews from surrounding areas to the Kraków Ghetto shortly after the beginning of World War II. Meanwhile, Oskar Schindler, an ethnic German businessman from Moravia, arrives in the city in hopes of making his fortune as a war profiteer. Schindler, a member of the Nazi Party, lavishes bribes upon the Wehrmacht and SS officials in charge of procurement. Sponsored by the military, Schindler acquires a factory for the production of army mess kits. Not knowing much about how to properly run such an enterprise, he gains a close collaborator in Itzhak Stern, an official of Krakow's Judenrat who has contacts with the Jewish business community and the black marketers inside the Ghetto. The Jewish businessmen lend Schindler the money for the factory in return for a small share of products produced. Opening the factory, Schindler pleases the Nazis and enjoys his newfound wealth and status as "Herr Direktor", while Stern handles all the administration. Schindler hires Jewish Poles instead of Catholic Poles because they cost less (the workers themselves get nothing; the wages are paid to the SS). Workers in Schindler's factory are allowed outside the ghetto, and Stern falsifies documents to ensure that as many people as possible are deemed "essential" to the German war effort, which saves them from being transported at concentration camps, or being killed.

Louis Vuitton to Unveil Jewellery Studio

French luxury brand Louis Vuitton will open a boutique and jewellery studio on Paris' Place Vendome this spring and is preparing its first perfume, the label's head Yves Carcelle told AFP Friday.

"In April we will have our own jewellery workshop and in May will will open our boutique in the same building," Carcelle said during the inauguration of the "Maison Rome Etoile," Louis Vuitton's new shop in the eternal city.

The project, unveiled in an area of Paris synonymous with luxury, will allow Louis Vuitton to "rejoin the exclusive club of the few jewellers who have their own workshops on the Place" and make the coveted adornments in situ, he said.

Carcelle said there was no timetable yet for the perfume launch -- and revelled in the fact that luxury meant not having to bow to pressure.

"We just at the beginning. We've recruited the famous 'nose', Jacques Cavallier, and we are in the final phase of buying a country house in Grasse," on the French Riviera, where the perfume laboratory will be built, he said.

"It's like when we recruited Marc Jacobs and they asked us the date of the first collection, we replied 'when Marc is ready': it's the same thing here, now it's 'when Jacques is ready'," Carcelle said.

Paula Abdul Exits 'X Factor'

For any "X Factor" fans who are thinking season two of the Simon Cowell-created singing competition will be business as usual, think again, because Monday, January 30, marked a veritable bloodletting of the show's key talent and judging panel.

In addition to the losses of mentor Nicole Scherzinger and host Steve Jones, original "American Idol" diva and delightfully unpredictable judge Paula Abdul will also not be returning to the program. A source close to Cowell told Deadline.com that all three personalities were asked to leave the show.

"None of the three left on their own accord," Deadline editor Nikki Finke wrote of what her insider source told her of the mass exodus. "It was cleaning house day at the so-so rated show."

Despite their frequent onscreen bickering and banter, Cowell spoke highly of Abdul when it was announced that she would be joining him on 'X Factor'. "I missed her the second she left ['Idol']," Cowell told Deadline last year. "Always loved working with her even though she can be a pain. I don't know what it is about her, but I've always clicked with her. You just have to get that chemistry, and she's right. I've never found anyone better than her."

Headline 1st Feb, 2012 / In a world where life is cheap

In A World Where Life Is Cheap

Student's Life Is The Cheapest!!

Special honoured dedication Ray Kurzweil Esq!

Our Exponential worldly hope!

Every morning millions of us the world over battle sanitation, water shortage, malnutrition to get dressed for school. The unfortunate ones trudge to school while the fortunate ones face up to true life's risk. Hanging for their lives with huge school bags , in two times loaded pickups, with loosely fitted unregulated CNG connections. This means and standard form of transport operates in almost all developing countries of the world.


The related school and the university administration has no jurisdiction over it. And neither do parents or the students. So one can well imagine the state of the affairs. Therefore the death of hundreds of students from negligence and overloading every year , is an accepted fact of living. And in this time frame, are such happenings the end of it's history?


Nay, good sir,more like the start. The greater tragedy is that the whole developing world experiences it but misses it's meaning. Will Somebody tell us please, as to what have we become? An essential feature of daily existence it seems is passivity. The international economic crisis has hurt everyone but, we should not accept these conditions at any price. Nobody should!


The proud Americans refer to their country as "God's Own!" But who should this planet "God's Own"? A time tested adage springs to mind, 'where there is concern, there's a hope'. Goodnight and God Bless you all!

SAM Daily Times - Voice of the Voiceless

YouTube Launches Educational Service

YouTube has launched a new network setting that will help schools to teach children via educational videos without being distracted from music videos or the content not meant for them to see.

Teachers will be able to filter their search with University, Education, and All Categories Tab at the top. Primary and Secondary educational videos with university oriented videos are under University tab, whereas some twelve disciplines are covered in Education Tab.

The new education oriented setting by YouTube is meant for more profound interactive learning for the children and it will also bid good bye to teachers’ concern about irrelevant content that cause distraction for children during the study sessions.

Royal Bank Of Scotland CEO Turns Down Bonus

Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Stephen Hester will not be accepting a 1 million pound ($1.5 million) bonus that drew criticism from British public and politicians, the bank said Sunday.

Spokesman David Gaffney said Hester would not receive the bonus of 3.6 million shares he was awarded last week by the board of the largely state-owned bank.

The British government owns an 82 percent stake, and politicians had criticized the reward at a time when Britons face painful spending cuts and tax hikes.

The government which has insisted it has no control over the bank's bonuses welcomed the announcement.

"This is a sensible and welcome decision that enables Stephen Hester to focus on the very important job he has got to do, namely to get back billions of pounds of taxpayers' money that was put into RBS," Treasury chief George Osborne said.

The board of directors decided last week to award Hester a bonus of 3.6 million shares – worth just under 1 million pounds at Friday's closing share price of 27.74 pence. That came on top of his annual salary of 1.2 million pounds.

Prime Minister David Cameron said Saturday that Hester's bonus was "a matter for him," but pointed out it was much less than last year's.

Euro crisis dominates EU summit

The eurozone crisis is going to be the major issue dominating the latest European Union summit to be held in Brussels on Monday.



The meeting intends to put special emphasis on "smart" budget cuts i.e. making them more well-targeted to provide room for future growth.


Most member states will be signing a new budget treaty or "fiscal compact",with the exception of UK which after opting out of the meeting has secured the observer status.


Leaving the attendance of the non-euro nations to the discretion of the summit president, the draft treaty says summits will be held at least on a biannual basis.

Don't Smell These Tulips!

Dense clusters of stalked creatures, rooted in the muddy bottoms of shallow seas some 500 million years ago, would have called to mind a submerged bed of tulips as they swayed gently with the passing waves.
Close inspection revealed that the bulbous, cuplike structure atop each stem, called a calyx, enclosed a unique filter-feeding system and gut.
Notably, the animal’s anus happens to be located in precisely the spot you would position your nose for a sniff, were it actually a tulip.
“This feeding system appears to be unique among animals," University of Toronto paleontologist Lorna O’Brien said in a press release. "We do not know where it fits in relation to other organisms."

Souce: Discovery News

Starbucks plans to open stores in India

Starbucks plans to open outlets in India in collaboration with Tata.

The first coffee shops would be opened on a 50-50 joint partnership with Tata Global Beverages by September in the Indian cities of Delhi and Mumbai.

"We're going to move as fast as possible in opening as many stores as we can so long as we are successful and so long as we are embraced by the Indian consumers," said president of Starbucks China and Asia Pacific, John Culver.

The coffee shops are going to be branded  "Starbucks Coffee: A Tata Alliance".

Live and let live!

By Sarah Mahmood

Being judgmental about why someone is a certain way, is a habit that is extremely prevalent amongst all of us. The problem however is that we never really can understand what the other person has gone through and therefore what has led them to act in that particular way.

We put the them on the horizon of our own experiences and vision. And that's what causes the whole debate! Our vision, which is actually narrow when it comes down to analyzing another person, is simply not enough. The best option therefore is simply refraining from being that critical.

Here, the policy of live and let live comes into play and that is precisely what the Pensive today aims to awaken in all its readers. Thus, happy Pensiving!  

Costa Concordia search abandoned

Underwater search of bodies on the stranded Italian cruise is abandoned due to deteriorating condition of the waters.


Fifteen people are still missing after the vessel crashed into rocks earlier this month, with 17 confirmed dead. Inspection of the part of the ship that is above the water line however is going to continue and specialist equipment is going to be used to look for dead bodies on the sea bed.


The conditions inside the ship have been described as tricky, with dives "limited to a maximun of 50 minutes, making it difficult to penetrate far into the vessel" (BBC News).


The ship itself cannot be moved safely until the fuel is pumped out, the latter being hampered by bad weather.

Student Feed / Innocent Theft

 POWELL, Wyoming. --

A 19-year-old college student accused of swiping a doughnut is going to be paying a pretty penny for that pastry.

The Northwest Trail reports that Zach O'Dell has agreed to pay a $200 fine, $10 in court costs - and 79 cents to cover the cost of the doughnut.
O'Dell was accused of eating the treat in Blair's Market in Powell on Nov. 28 and leaving without paying for it. He was charged with shoplifting

Attorney Sandra Kitchen says she has deferred the prosecution, and the charge will be dismissed in six months if O'Dell stays out of trouble. The Trail reports that O'Dell declined to comment.  The Northwest College student has been studying criminal justice.

Courtesy Saniya Yousaf / Bahria Univesity

Student Today / Ludwick Marishane

Late last year, 21 year-old Ludwick Marishane of Cape Town, South Africa was named the 2011 Global Student Entrepreneur of the Year at the 2011 GSEA (Global Student Entrepreneur Awards), beating out 1,600 other student nominees from 42 countries. Ludwick won the title for his product Drybath, the only non-water based bath substitute lotion for the whole body.
Ludwick's Interview in Huffington Post

To LOL or not to LOL!?

The word “LOL” has taken the world by storm. It dominates everything from our text messages to Facebook and it sometimes, quite accidentally, appears in our essays. However, for it to appear in the Oxford English Dictionary (which, entering into the spirit of things, I will now refer to as OED) really puts its prominence into perspective.

Now that it’s recognised as an actual word, does this signal the start of the degradation of the English Language? Traditionalists will argue that it is and it’s the addition of words like these which could degrade the linguistic value of the 130-year-old OED.
It is not hard to see why some may undermine the word “LOL” as it is commonly associated with the younger generation. But wait – “LOL” has a history – arguable though this may be, the word “LOL” has actually been used back in the mid-20^th century. It made its not-so-celebrated debut back in the 1960s and stood, not for “laughing out loud” but rather, for “little old lady”. But by the 1980s, the “LOL” we know today was born and took off with the invention of the internet.
But why antagonise the word to begin with? Surely its use was born out of necessity just like how humans evolved to have brains out of the need to survive; No, I am not implying that the use of the word “LOL” is a matter of life or death. However, it is worth considering the fact that we now live in a society which craves quick and easy solutions. And really, “LOL” helps meet those goals.
In fact, the addition of words like “LOL” could actually be complementing our language. After all, “LOL” is just like any other abbreviation – it is practical, shortening words which would normally take up a lot more space on a page. Realistically, “LOL” can’t be any worse than the word “CD” or “ASAP”.
OED editor, Graeme Diamond, explains that “[Words like ‘LOL’] help to say more in media where there is a limit to a number of characters one may use in a single message” and so tis’ true! While I am not advocating students using “LOL” in their essays, it serves a practical function, keeping things quick, short and simple while still allowing us to bring the message across effectively.
“LOL” appeared on the scene for good reason. Its practicality (and also sometimes, the humour it provides) has made it a linguistic companion of today’s society. Now the OED has added “FYI” and “OMG” to their comprehensive list of words. Does this mean the end of language as we know it? No, it doesn’t. It just means we have developed different expressions to be used in situations which were not necessarily available way back when (like in Facebook, for example). Let’s face it: why write, “Oh my god! That is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” when you could write, “OMG LOL! I’m ROFL!”.
And so the OED made its verdict – we now have “LOL”, “OMG” and “FYI” floating about amidst words like “antediluvian” and “colloquialism”.

Picked from " TheNationalStudent.com" by Sarah-Jane Gan at University of Surrey

Students celebrate Spring Festival in New York

Students from Beijing attend a parade to celebrate the traditional Chinese lunar Year of the Dragon at Chinatown in New York, the United States, Jan. 29, 2012. (Xinhua/Wang Lei)

Students rename NASA moon probes Ebb and Flow

Montana: A pair of unmanned NASA spacecraft that are orbiting the Moon were renamed Ebb and Flow on Jan 17th by a middle school class in Montana, the US space agency announced.
The original names for the twin probes Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) -- A and B -- were not very inspired, admitted principal investigator Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"We were so busy in the design and getting these two spacecraft launched on time that when we gave them names, we gave them names of A and B, and that isn't too creative. So we asked the youth of America to assist us," she said.
More than 11,000 students took part in the contest to rename the twin craft which aim to map the Moon's surface, determine its gravity field and reveal the contents of its inner core.