SAM Daily Times - THE VOICE OF THE VOICELESS

3/17/2012

Kenya Hits Heights Despite Adverse Conditions

Despite abduction scandals and the euro zone crisis, Kenya has been flourishing in tourism, with record results in 2011. The outlook for 2012 involves caution.

Kenya’s best performance in tourism came in 2011, whereby earnings rose by 32.8% and international arrivals were up by 15.4% to 1.26 million. This is quite an achievement considering that most countries around the globe were and are struggling for revenue from tourism.

The UK provides the greatest source of income for Kenya with the US in close second place with the Italians in possession of the bronze medal. In terms of African arrivals, Uganda claims number one spot, though it is necessary to remember that the afore-mentioned figures are taken from airports and fail to count border crossing. This leaves the figures about African arrivals a little unreliable.

However, the Kenyan tourism minister has warned that 2012 may not be so rosy. Firstly, the crisis in Europe is only beginning to see a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel and, secondly, tourists now have good reason to feel under threat on Kenyan soil.

Last November, tourists were abducted by Somali insurgents in Lamu, an event, which has raised fears amongst incoming tourists, who no longer consider Kenya to be as safe as they thought.

It is a pity for the Kenyan tourist board, which had plans to invest further in marketing campaigns aimed at the Chinese, Korean, Middle Eastern and other African markets. Nobody says that Kenya is incapable of overcoming this hurdle but it has forced the Kenyans into exercising some caution and not getting carried away with the success of 2011.

(Source: Tourism-Review)

Yelawolf Trying To "Get Right" After Spleen Injury

There's a Shady party scheduled to go down at SXSW on Friday night (March 16), but sadly Yelawolf will not be performing with his labelmates 50 Cent and Slaughterhouse.

The Gadsden, Alabama, MC was hospitalized March 2 with an injury to his spleen after a stage-diving accident in Madison, Wisconsin.

"I have [spoken] to him, I spoke to him, I called him and checked on him. I think he stage-dove or something like that," Royce da 5'9" told MTV News of Yela's status when we caught up with the MC in Austin, Texas. "I don't know if people know this because Yelawolf is such a mild-mannered, laid-back kinda guy, but he gets real rowdy onstage and he doesn't mind putting his physical health in danger as well as the fans', which makes for a greater show."

No doubt, Yela has earned a reputation as an energetic performer, mixing both rap and punk-rock elements into his stage show. Unfortunately, after the Wisconsin show, doctors recommended he cancel a number of dates, including a concert at Saint Andrew's Hall in label boss Eminem's native Detroit and, of course, tonight's SXSW showcase.

Not that the Shady 2.0 show will be without highlights. 50 Cent is set to perform his 2003 classic debut, Get Rich or Die Tryin', in its entirety and Slaughterhouse will take the stage in what is expected to be a lyrical free-for-all. Big K.R.I.T., Schoolboy Q, Action Bronson and XXL freshman Don Trip are also scheduled to hit the stage.

As far as Catfish Billy, Royce expects his buddy to make a full recovery. "He's well, he's doing well," he said, "He just had to cancel a couple of shows just so he could get right."

(Source: Mtv)

Lenses to Ease the Strain From Staring at Screens

If I moved my computer monitor close enough to see the screen clearly, it was nearly in my lap. If I left the monitor where it should be, I had to lean forward awkwardly. During my annual eye exam, I told my optometrist about my workstation discomfort and the strain it was causing my eyes, neck and back.

Eyestrain, headaches, blurred vision,dry eyes, and neck and shoulder painare common complaints of someone experiencing computer vision syndrome, according to the American Optometric Association.

If you optimize your work environment for comfort and still have problems, the solution may be another pair of glasses, the association says. Normally, I’d be skeptical of a trade association suggesting that I buy more of their wares. But studies have found that a majority of people who work on computers or hand-held devices experience some vision problems, the association said.

With 31 percent of those over 18 saying that, on average, they now spend at least five hours a day on a computer, tablet or smartphone, it appears that these symptoms will only become more common.

Many of those people need special-purpose glasses with lenses adjusted to bring the computer screen sharply into focus. The problem with computer work is twofold, said Gary Heiting, an optometrist and associate editor of AllAboutVision.com, a consumer information site.

“During computer use,” Dr. Heiting said, “our eyes not only have to stay focused but also have to stay properly converged for long periods of time,” referring to the ability to move both eyes inward. The glasses people use for driving or the ones they use for reading books often have the wrong focal point for computer use or are ill-suited for computer use.

This convergence fatigue can cause eyestrain and blurred vision, just as focusing fatigue does, he added. What is more, computer workers blink much less frequently than they would during a face-to-face conversation, and that leads to dry eyes at work.

Lost in daydreams? It could be a sign you're intelligent as absent-minded children have sharper brains

People whose minds wander might actually have sharper brains.

A study shows that those who appear to be constantly distracted in fact have more ‘working memory’, giving them the ability to do two things at the same time.

Participants in the study had to either press a button in response to the appearance of a certain letter on a screen, or tap in time with their breath. The researchers checked periodically to ask if their minds were wandering.

At the end, they measured the participants’ working memory capacity, giving them a score for their ability to remember a series of letters interspersed with easy maths questions.

Daniel Levinson, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said those with higher working memory capacity reported ‘more mind wandering during these simple tasks’ even though their performance was not compromised.

The results of his research, published online in Psychological Science, are the first to show the association with mind wandering and intelligence.

It is thought the extra mental workspace is used, for instance, when adding up two spoken numbers without being able to write them down.

Its capacity has been associated with general measures of intelligence, such as reading comprehension and IQ score.

The latest study underscores how important working memory is in allowing the brain to focus on the most pressing issues.

The face of Jesus in a field, a lake of blood and the strangest cloud ever: What in the world is going on with Google Maps?

A building shaped like a swastika, the son of God's face in a field and a very disturbing lake in Iraq... You'd think that searching on Google Maps would be a rather mundane task - but it is clearly full of surprises.

These are just some of the bizarre images that have cropped up while trawling the search engine's geo-location software.

So if anyone can explain how a car was parked vertically on the side of a building in the Netherlands, please let us know.(By daily mail.co.uk)

1 Weather Beats Many Weather Apps On Google Play

By Zeeshan Tariq on etechmag.com:

Customizing an Android phone is one thing that many enjoy and keeps dozens of them busy in most of their hours. Finding cool, productive, entertaining, puzzling, and all other sorts of apps on Google Play is a great hobby these days. One app that is a must in any given Android phone is weather app. As you already know there are numerous weather apps available on Play offering fantastic performance, they do what they say.

But there’s one app which I recently downloaded, explored, and experienced delivering wonderful graphics, easy to use layout, and a social element making it a complete and fully functional app to date. And guess what, it is free. The name is 1Weather.

1Weather app is developed by “OneLouder Apps” who have earned a good reputation for their apps: “TweetCaster” for Twitter, and “FriendCaster” for Facebook.

1Weather is a very simple weather application that appears as a circle widget on your homescreen outlining the temperature of the day, chances of precipitation, date and day, and the location you’ve chosen. After you launch the app for the first time it automatically detects your current location, but if you want to add more location(s) you can simply achieve it by going to settings then clicking the Home icon at the top right corner of the screen. Tap the + button there, type a location, bingo.

Go to your homescreen, press and hold, select 1Weather widget, here it will let you select from the multiple locations you’ve added in the settings.

This is not all, 1Weather has eight graphically enriched screens including Today, 7-Day Forecast, Severe Weather, Precipitation, Radar, Sun & Moon, Tweets, and Top Weather Pics. Each of these eight screens are fully functional and very easy to operate.

You can also change the backgrounds from a number of given choices. Also, there are some notifications settings, appearance settings, and refresh rate that you can play with in the Settings menu.

One thing that is touch disappointed for me is that 1Weather app shows you the temperature in Fahrenheit, there is nothing much you can do to change it to Celsius. If you don’t know the conversions it shall be difficult for you to preplan your activities based on temperature displayed on the app.

In one of the eight screens of 1Weather is Tweets, which is very novel of OneLouder Apps, with it you can check real time weather updates of your current location and see what people have to say about it.

Iran Blamed For Cyberattacking On BBC Persian Service

British Broadcasting Corporation’s Persian service has suffered from sensitive cyber attack lately, Director General Mark Thompson said in his speech yesterday. He did not blame Tehran directly for this incident but extracts of his speech do indicate towards that point.

He said that news feeds of BBC in Iran have been disrupted as well as the jamming of satellite is also a part of attack. Mr. Thompson has accussed the Iranian authorities in the past for arresting and intimidating the families of BBC’s journalists demanding them to stop their Persian service.

Many of the Western journalists reside in Iran to work for BBC’s Persian TV, radio, and online service. Mr. Thompson said that they are taking the neccessary steps as they always do to counter such events.

Source:etechmag.com

MIT Physicists Discovered An Ultra Efficient LED

Some researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s physics department have build an LED (Light Emitting Diode) that produces more electrical energy than it is fed with, making it having electrical efficiency more than 100 percent. And the good thing about this LED is that it doesn’t break the first law of Thermodynamics.

Thermodynamics is “the branch of physical science concerned with heat and its relation to other forms of energy and work.”

The researchers chose an LED that had small band gap and fed it with smaller voltages. Each time of this experiment when the voltage was halved electrical power reduced by a factor of four but light emitted only dropped by a factor of two. The LED produced 69 picowatts of light using 30 picowatts of power, stealing the rest of the energy from its surroundings to create more photons.

MIT researchers involved in this experiment have published their research in a paper published in Physical Review Letters.

They say “Experiments directly confirm for the first time that this behaviour continues beyond the conventional limit of unity electrical-to-optical power conversion efficiency.”