| Airborne Bacteria Make It Rain, Researchers Find
The sky is not an ethereal, sterile realm. It's teeming with bacteria, and scientists say that the microbes play a powerful role in producing rain and snow. While the idea that bacteria could prompt precipitation was previously known, a paper published this week in Science shows that they're more important than anyone expected. Researchers led by Louisiana State University microbiologist Brent Christner analyzed snow samples from around the world, categorizing the content of their "nucleators" -- tiny particles that help water vapor coalesce and freeze. All snow and most rain begins as ice. Though water is widely thought to have a freezing point of zero degrees Celsius, it's not so simple in the clouds, where pristine vapors only bind to form ice crystals at exceedingly cold temperatures.
CC Apaches hang on to beat Glendale 107-99
Bruce Whetten / The Daily Dispatch Cochise College's Steve White puts up a shot in the second half of the Apaches ACCAC game with Glendale Saturday. White finished with a team high 30 points as the Apaches came away with a 107-99 win. Cochise is at Pima on Wednesday. .
Conster Nation
STON, S.C. -- Ken Lay died last week. Huzzah. Huzzah. There are some dead who don't deserve respect. If I had a chariot I'd tie his lifeless corpse to the back and drag him through the streets of Houston - slowly enough to let every one of his former employees spit on him - before towing his worthless carcass to the middle of what was Enron Field where he'd fry on a pyre of worthless stock certificates. And that would be too good for him. I wanted him to rot in prison for thirty years. I wanted him to live a life far worse than the life he forced on thousands of his employees; decent hardworking folks whom he stuck with shares of a company that was as hollow as he was immoral, shares that he forced them to keep even as he dumped his and made millions.
One dead, 8 hurt in wall collapse
Dr Yadvinder Singh has studied the need-based nitrogen management using chlorophyll meter and leaf curl chart. This technique results in 25 per cent saving in fertiliser application. Chlorophyll meter is a simple hand-held devise that helps determine the fertiliser requirements of the crop. It is the green pigmentation or the colour of the plant that indicates the fertiliser needs of the crop and chlorophyll meter enables to measure the same. Similarly, by making use of the leaf curl chart for nitrogen application and management on 2.6 million hectare on which paddy is grown, the farmers can effect saving of around Rs 50 crore. Dr Yadvinder Singh is the principal investigator of an inter-disciplinary Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research-funded project on management of paddy straw.
Windows Live Platform Services: A guide for the perplexed
All about Microsoft Latest Post | Last 10 Posts | Archives Previous Post: Apple finally acknowledges iPhone's Exchange support Next Post: Ballmer: It's all about Web developers Windows Live Platform Services: A guide for the perplexed Posted in: Windows Live Office Live Web 2.0 Mix '08 Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie outlined during his Mix '08 keynote this week a very high-level vision about how Microsoft is moving to be more of a utility-computing/cloud-computing vendor. Ozzie didn't talk specifics about any of the plumbing that makes it possible. But David Treadwell, Corporate Vice president of Live Platform Services, with whom I had a chance to meet at the conference this week, shed some light on what Microsoft is building to enable all the fancy "entertainment mesh" and "connected productivity" scenarios that Microsoft is promising to provide in the coming years.
After campus gets ‘juicier,’ Yale considers legal options
A site is not responsible for users' posts only if it merely conveys information and has no role in editing the content as a matter of policy and practice, she said. But JuicyCampus' encouragement of racy content, she said, could make it responsible for the resulting posts. Ivester said JuicyCampus does not interfere with content, except for removing spam and copyrighted material, which he said is consistent with federal law. Aftab also said JuicyCampus could be sued for consumer fraud for violating its “always anonymous" slogan. The Web site did track down a user at Loyola Marymount University in California when he posted a bomb threat in December 2007, and provided the information to the authorities, Ivester confirmed. If JuicyCampus has the capability to track posts in some cases, it has a legal obligation to do so consistently, Aftab said.
The Daily Weekly
Outfitted at each desk with a flat-screen TV and three Xbox 360 consoles, the testers are checking that Xbox 360's latest boredom-eradicating features—which enable you to fast-forward through movies before they've finished downloading, and chat with your friends via MSN instant messenger while you download free game samples—can be installed and used without the system freezing or crashing. So far, it's touch and go. Days from now, every Xbox 360 user will be prompted to install the new upgrade when they boot up their machines. But the testers have to do it first, downloading the software, then performing the new tasks, over and over, on several units of each variation of the console: Those sold in North America, the European Union, Japan, and "Rest of Asia" all differ. Each row of testers has a designated "lead," who manages the team and copies down the data: IP addresses, software version, serial numbers.
Campus calendar
When Harry meets Wellesley Harry Belafonte has a permanent place in the cultural canon as a multi-talented entertainer, and his work as a social activist runs just as deep. Belafonte was a member of the executive board of Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, served as the cultural adviser to the Peace Corps, established the Belafonte Foundation to support African students studying in the United States, and counts the Martin Luther King Jr. Peace Prize and the Nelson Mandela Courage Award among his honors. He will give a lecture titled "Social Justice: Within and Beyond Our Borders" at Wellesley on Tuesday. 7 p.m. Free. Wellesley College, Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center, Tishman Commons, Wellesley. 781-283-2901. .
O'Reilly Last Night
As always, I'm on the free-speech side of this issue. Each site's proprietor has a responsibility to not allow his comment sections to become racist, sexist, violent cesspools, and some sites are better at fostering a decent comment culture than others. But just because some sites become nasty is not a reason to demand regulation of the Internet, as Bill sometimes suggests, or to suggest that because some people in a comment section are juvenile jerks, that a site is Nazi-like in any way. The best way to deal with coarse commentary on the Internet is to point it out, shine a little sunlight, and push site proprietors to foster cultures of decency on their own sites. Comments sections can be nasty places, and there are very few sites that can claim theirs are totally and completely clean (including this one), no matter what moderation policies are in place.
U.S. candidates blitz states as Super Tuesday looms
She has less than Obama with only a few years in the senate where she showed no leadership and in fact, enabled Bush in his disastrous foreign policy debacle, the worst blunder in American history. Her misamanagement of her campaign is another example of her incompetence. .
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