http://www.hinduismtoday.com/blogs-news/...14273.html

EXCERPT: An unsettled and ongoing debate in the area of foreign development assistance concerns the extensive role played by faith-based organisations (FBO). In the US context, in particular, FBOs have been heavily involved in the delivery of both domestic social and foreign development assistance activities funded by the US government....

http://technmarketing.com/cellphone/the-evolution/

EXCERPT: I have been thinking about this trend way before Meerkat was a thing. In fact, I believe it first occurred to me before Twitter was a thing. Now before I explain why I think the trend is clear, let me state that I do not believe that each link in this chain replaces the one that preceded it. I believe that each stage remains relevant but its relevancy decreases as the new stage enters. So let’s take a walk down memory lane....

http://discovermagazine.com/2014/june/14...rs-mystery

EXCERPT: One of the most remarkable and mysterious technical advances in the history of the world is written on the hide of a 13th-century calf. Inked into the vellum is a chart of the Mediterranean so accurate that ships today could navigate with it. Most earlier maps that included the region were not intended for navigation and were so imprecise that they are virtually unrecognizable to the modern eye.

With this map, it’s as if some medieval mapmaker flew to the heavens and sketched what he saw — though in reality, he could never have traveled higher than a church tower.

The person who made this document — the first so-called portolan chart, from the Italian word portolano, meaning “a collection of sailing directions” — spawned a new era of mapmaking and oceanic exploration. For the first time, Europeans could accurately visualize their continent in a way that enabled them to improvise new navigational routes instead of simply going from point to point.

That first portolan mapmaker also created an enormous puzzle for historians to come, because he left behind few hints of his method: no rough drafts, no sketches, no descriptions of his work. “Even with all the information he had — every sailor’s notebook, every description in every journal — I wouldn’t know how to make the map he made,” says John Hessler, a specialist in modern cartography at the Library of Congress.

But Hessler has approached the question using a tool that is foreign to most historians: mathematics. By systematically analyzing the discrepancies between the portolan charts and modern ones, Hessler has begun to trace the mapmaker’s tracks within the maps themselves....

http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/books-f...onderland/

EXCERPT: [...] Lewis Carroll, like many other Victorian ‘innocents’, was obsessed by the beauty and incorruptibility of young girls. The camera was a fairly recent invention. He used it to make images of girls dressed as princesses or beggars or — the clearest image of innocence — naked. Douglas-Fairhurst has fun — while making a serious point — with Carroll’s involuted letters to Alice’s mother (and other mothers) seeking permission to photograph their daughters. ‘On each occasion the correspondence turned into an elaborate dance of questions about how far they might go towards “absolute undress”.’ Douglas-Fairhurst shows that as Carroll insisted on the child’s ‘blissful unselfconsciousness’ his own writing became more selfconscious. Girls were variously ‘undraped’ or ‘undressed’; they were ‘in primitive costume’ or ‘Eve’s original dress’ or ‘their favourite dress of “nothing”.’ Douglas-Fairhurst remarks that Carroll’s increasingly elaborate attempts to avoid saying what he meant were ‘the rhetorical equivalent of a hand-tailored suit with a fancy waistcoat’. The book goes into both innocent examples of this love of little girls and an exploration of the dark alternatives to innocence. Douglas-Fairhurst points out that the looking glass makes everything double and reverses things....

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/j...99750.html

EXCERPT: In this deeply absorbing book [The Jungle Books], James T. Costa seeks to establish Alfred Russel Wallace as the fully vested co-creator of what he feels we should once again call the “Darwin-Wallace Theory” of evolution by natural selection. That Wallace had a part in the history of evolutionary theory is, of course, well known. While he was collecting in Malaysia, the basic facts of natural selection occurred to him with the kind of beautiful clarity most of us experience only in dreams (and Wallace was indeed suffering from malaria at the time). He sent his account to Charles Darwin, catapulting the more senior naturalist into a period of frenzied writing, at the end of which stood the magnificent achievement of The Origin of Species (1859), a massive tome Darwin persisted in calling an “abstract” only.

The book’s appearance was heralded, the year before, by a mix of papers presented to the Linnean Society into which Darwin’s colleagues had cleverly incorporated Wallace’s letter—a smart move that saved Darwin from looking like a jerk in the eyes of posterity but also established him as the primary agent in the evolution business. For, as Andrew Berry points out in his lucid introduction to this study, even if you’re a Victorian gentleman, you want to be first. Since he was still in Southeast Asia, Wallace didn’t even know about the Linnean Society presentation, which, tragically, happened on the very same day that Darwin’s infant son Charles was buried. In later years, as Darwin reaped both the scorn and then, increasingly, the admiration of the rest of the world, Wallace watched from the sidelines, apparently without rancor. His own big book on species he never wrote.

But we have his field notes from those years, and we also have Professor Costa, editor of an annotated edition of Wallace’s “Species Notebook” and the best possible guide to Wallace’s meandering mind. Wallace’s notebook, now sitting on a shelf at the Linnean Society in London, traveled some 14,000 miles across Southeast Asia in the pockets of its author. [...] Drawing extensively on that fragrant volume, Costa sets out to prove that Wallace and Darwin followed analogous paths as they painstakingly assembled evidence in favor of natural selection. As he shows, the convergence of their ideas manifested itself even in the words they chose to express those ideas....

Moved from South Texas to Oregon already. May have to move to Alaska soon! I can't stand the heat, so I get out of the kitchen.

"2014 Earth's warmest year on record;

December 2014 record warm; Global oceans also record warm for 2014


The globally averaged temperature over land and ocean surfaces for 2014 was the highest among all years since record keeping began in 1880. The December combined global land and ocean average surface temperature was also the highest on record."===http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/summary-in...al/2014/12

This is extraordinary news! If this method really works, we have just made a major stride in curing cancer!

"The deadly polio virus may be the key to curing some cancers. By injecting a modified version of polio in two patients with glioblastoma brain tumors, a doctor has eliminated their tumors without infecting them with polio.

CBS’s “60 Minutes” followed the patients for 10 months during the trial and will release the full report Sunday. Matthias Gromeier, a molecular biologist at Duke University, has been researching the idea for 15 years, first beginning with studies, then animal trials and now human tests.

Patient Stephanie Lipscomb was 20 when she entered the experimental treatment. “They didn’t expect me to live more than two years, I don’t think,” Lipscomb told USA Today. In 2012, doctors injected the genetically modified version of the polio virus into her tumor. Now, three years later, there is no active cancer.

The modified polio virus is able to remove the shield human cancers put up against the immune system, which then allows the immune system to fight back, Gromier explained to CBS. It only took one dose for Lipscomb to become cancer free.

“This, to me, is the most promising therapy I have seen in my career, period,” Henry Friedman, a neuro-oncologist and deputy director of the Brain Tumor Center at Duke University, told CBS. Friedman has been researching a cure for glioblastoma for more than 30 years.

Polio is a life-threatening, infectious disease that leaves its victims paralyzed. But, the disease, for the most part, has been eradicated after the development and widespread use of the polio vaccine in the 1950s. Gromeier’s lab at Duke modified the virus by adding genetic information from the rhinovirus, a cause of the common cold.

According to CBS’s report, the polio virus appears to start the killing of the tumor and then allows the immune system to do the rest of the damage. During human trials, 11 of the 22 participants succumbed to their tumors. But in two patients, doctors have not detected any signs of the cancer three years after they started receiving the experimental treatment."===http://www.ibtimes.com/cancer-patients-c...ts-1862796

The plane knew it was going to crash, but couldn't override the deranged pilot.