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Well I wouldn't call it a castle, but it is nice.
All stars are not created equal, nor are their creators. By far the best-known stellar nursery, the Orion Nebula, has spawned thousands of young stars, large and small. It glows so brightly the naked eye can see it, even though it is 1,350 light-years away. On a clear, dark, moonless night the cloud of gas and dust tha...
No one had previously noticed the ring because foreground and background dust obscures the newfound object. "We were completely surprised to find out there's this beautiful ringlike structure," says Eddie Schlafly, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany. He and his colleagues found the ring ...
These observations revealed that the Orion Nebula lies on the rim of a vast ring of dust that is 330 light-years in diameter—so large that much of it spills into Monoceros, a constellation east of Orion. If the ring were visible to the naked eye, it would look 27 times wider than the full moon. The Orion Nebula sits in...
John Bally, an astronomer at the University of Colorado Boulder who was unaffiliated with the discovery, calls the new dust-mapping technique that revealed the ring phenomenal. "It really allows us to measure the dust distribution in three dimensions for the first time," he says. "That I think is an astonishing result....
Bally and Christopher McKee, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, say this scenario is plausible but requires confirmation. If the idea is right, the dust ring should be expanding, so scientists will have to measure the dust expansion speed to verify it. Those measurements would also indicate wh...
Europe’s new Gaia spacecraft may lend further insight as it determines distances and motions of stars throughout the sky. Gaia may reveal stars that have moved away from the ring’s center, siblings of the deceased stars that created the ring, teaching us more about the formation process. The discovery of the Orion dust...
It's about as far from the Kardashians as you can get.
Carter Hathaway is a graduate student in the department of communication and journalism at the University of Maine.
Fifty years ago this week, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. That law eventually led to the formation of both National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). While many Americans associate PBS with such popular programs as “Sesame Street,” “Antiques Roadshow” ...
Long before E!, Bravo or MTV, PBS introduced America’s television audience to reality TV.
The show was called “An American Family,” and when it aired on PBS from January to March 1973, it offered an intimate and sensationalistic examination of a single family alongside a powerful critique of American society. Unlike commercial networks dependent on advertising revenue, PBS had the flexibility to broadcast a...
Today’s media-savvy viewers largely understand the exaggerated and contrived aspects of “reality” TV. In fact, producers like Mark Burnett prefer calling the genre “unscripted drama” over “reality TV” to acknowledge staging and forgo any claim to an honest portrayal of reality.
But whether it’s “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” or “The Real Housewives” franchise, our television sets are flooded with manipulative and staged dramas designed to delight, shock and even outrage their audiences. These shows amuse, entertain or provoke eye rolls, but they explicitly avoid raising larger philosophica...
“An American Family” was different. From the start, producer Craig Gilbert sought to use the Loud family — mother Pat, father Bill and their five children in Santa Barbara, Calif. — to force audiences to grapple with issues at the heart of the American condition. He knew that an accurate portrayal of an American family...
Rather than construct and contrive situations, Gilbert preferred a cinéma vérité approach — an observational filming style that values simple recording over complex editorial production. In allowing the quotidian details of an average family to unfold before the camera, Gilbert assumed, extraordinary insights would eme...
The project was, to some extent, a way for Gilbert to grapple with his own demons. Nine years after the show ended, he explained that it originated in desperation. Short on work, drinking heavily and trapped in a troubled marriage, Gilbert searched for answers. He settled on the idea of using the medium of a “normal” f...
The tension arising from the generation gap, confusion over gender roles in transition and the changing technological landscape all made contemporary life particularly stressful. Parents born in the 1940s and 1950s with ingrained ideas about the nuclear family and work ethic clashed with children who indulged in self-e...
Watching perfect sitcom families on television exacerbated those anxieties, as nobody could possibly measure up to the impossible standards broadcast every night. Even sitcoms like “All in the Family,” which explored these issues, did so in a packaged way. Laugh tracks buffered discomfort, and audiences could count on ...
Of course, real life often does not provide nice, neat resolutions. The mere fact that these shows were scripted created a feeling of separation from reality: Viewers understood that what they were watching, even when it navigated relevant cultural subjects, was not real.
So Gilbert brilliantly inverted the formula. He found a “perfect” family, one that would appear “reassuringly comfortable” to viewers, mimicking the plastered-smile sitcom families found on the commercial networks. “An American Family” would hook the viewers with its seeming normality, then educate them by raising larg...
It worked. While Gilbert was not aware of the specific issues confronting the family at the beginning, his belief that no American family was perfect quickly proved to be correct. Viewers watched as Pat and Bill divorced and son Lance refused to hide his homosexuality.
Though the show fulfilled the producer’s vision, the format of “An American Family” was ultimately unsuccessful. The Louds complained, most explicitly after reviewers and critics cast the family as hollow and problematic. Pat accused Gilbert of being manipulative and even staging events — accusations that surprised the...
“An American Family” aired only 12 episodes and then disappeared, only to be rediscovered by scholars later and used as a historical document. While the program attracted millions of viewers, the criticisms from reviewers and subsequent condemnation from the Louds — who did not want the public to perceive them negative...
Recalling “An American Family” allows us to think about the ways in which PBS shaped our media landscape. It is unlikely that any commercial network would have been courageous enough to air the series. Commercial networks, dependent on advertising revenue, rarely broadcast material that could be incredibly challenging ...
Today, reality TV is sophomoric, contrived and often inane. Unlike “An American Family,” it rarely challenges viewers in a critical and thoughtful manner. But in the early 1970s, PBS thought American audiences could handle such material. This type of innovation and experimentation — and, yes, even faith in American TV ...
Carter Hathaway Carter Hathaway is a graduate student in the department of communication and journalism at the University of Maine.
Last week, I noted that Internet ad spending had dropped five percent in the first three months of the year, and wondered when Web ads might rebound.
And now, here’s a data point for optimists in the “soon, real soon” camp: Procter & Gamble (PG), the world’s biggest marketer, is pouring more into Web ads than ever. Last quarter, it increased its spending on Internet display ads by nearly 150 percent.
Those numbers, from ad tracking service TNS, via Ad Age, are similar to outlays from rival Johnson & Johnson (JNJ). Both companies are now spending about four percent of their ad bugets on online display–the boring banner ads on Yahoo (YHOO) and Time Warner online unit AOL (TWX) that everyone loves to complain about.
The numbers don’t include other Web categories like video and search. But as much as some of us (ok, me) like to chatter about video sites like YouTube and Hulu, Web video is still a tiny ad market. And consumer packaged goods companies like P&G and J&J, who bring you everything from toothpaste to diapers, have traditi...
These still aren’t huge numbers in the grand scheme of things: For P&G, that amounts to about $26.9 million in the first three months of the year; for J&J, $15.5 million.
But if this keeps up, it will be a big deal. Internet boosters have been waiting a very long time for the consumer packaged goods guys, who are responsible for a huge swath of offline advertising spending, to move onto the Web. Astonishing that it’s taken until 2009 to get them there, but you’re not going to hear many ...
Air pollution is rarely a major concern for most people in Western Europe. You seldom notice it except when sitting in heavy traffic or when it obscures the far horizon at a scenic spot.
However until the middle of last century it was a different story, with heavy industry and domestic heating filling city air with smoke, noxious gases and ozone. These air pollutants contribute to smog: the unpleasant combination of gases and particles that irritates the lungs and can do lasting damage to health. Many ...
New research on the health impacts of outdoor air pollution suggests that it is responsible for more than 3m premature deaths around the world each year and that this number could double by 2050. The study, published in Nature, looks at how the major sources of air pollutants, including traffic, industry, agriculture a...
Unsurprisingly, the greatest effects were found in rapidly developing, heavily populated countries such as China and India. Despite large increases in industrial production, energy generation and vehicle traffic, the study identifies domestic and commercial energy use associated with heating and cooking as the biggest ...
China suffers the most, accounting for more than 40% of air pollution-related deaths worldwide – more than 1.3m each year. The country’s large population, intensive agriculture and heavy industrialisation mean that economic development has come at a high environmental cost.
Major cities such as Beijing have experienced rapid deterioration in air quality associated with economic growth and the changing lifestyles of an expanding urban middle class. Traditional paper fans have long since been replaced by air conditioning as the preferred means of keeping cool in summer. At the turn of the c...
Ordinary Chinese citizens are well aware of the problem. Environmental issues top the list of major public concerns and are a popular topic for online discussion. Air quality is monitored on a continuous basis at more than 1,000 sites nationwide, and a host of popular mobile phone apps stream live data on air pollution...
Beijing’s geography means that its air quality can be particularly bad. Pollution from factories, farms and homes right across the vast and fertile North China Plain – the country’s traditional economic heart – is trapped by southerly winds against the mountains that surround the city to the north and west. Pollutants ...
The Chinese government, keen to present the city’s best face to the world, imposed strict air pollution controls during the summer Olympics in 2008, for the APEC forum last autumn, and most recently for a military parade to mark the end of World War II. On each occasion the haze vanished – a clear demonstration of what...
But the long-term changes needed to make this blue sky an everyday occurrence require greater effort. Plans are underway to relocate polluting industries, move to cleaner energy generation and tighten enforcement of environmental regulations.
Beijing steelworks was moved out of the city into neighbouring Hebei province before the Olympics; now other manufacturing industries are following suit. New, cleaner and more efficient facilities will reduce the sources of pollution and shift them downwind of the city. However, with a population of more than 100m and ...
A shift in power generation from coal to gas is also underway, bringing benefits for climate as well as air quality. China currently leads the world in renewable energy production, with its huge investments in solar, wind and hydropower. These make up only 10% of the country’s energy needs, but are expected to rise to ...
However, the balance between economic development and environmental protection is starting to shift, much as it did in the West half a century ago. The new policies now being put in place will put China on a cleaner trajectory than the one assumed in the new Nature study.
The authors of the study are right to highlight the human costs of air pollution, and to warn of the future dangers of “business as usual” development. But in China now there is a new desire for clearer air that will put the nation on a different path – and reduce the heavy toll of air pollution-related deaths.
Oliver Wild is a Reader in Atmospheric Science at Lancaster University.
CBSSports.com Shop - Everything Sports! Show your love for the NFL with Arizona Cardinals Home Décor from the Official Online Store of CBS Sports. We carry an extensive collection of Arizona Cardinals Home Décor including AZ Cardinals House Decorations. Don’t forget to check out the Banners, Fat Head and Arizona Cardin...
Moscow authorities are considering a plan to put about 100 prayer grounds in city parks in order to tackle the shortage of mosques brought on by the massive influx of migrants from Muslim countries.
The proposed prayer places could serve as a temporary solution for a city whose official population stands at nearly 12 million yet only has four mosques – one of which is closed for repairs – the authors of the project, who refer to themselves as a “group of urbanists”, told Izvestia daily.
In comparison, London has 100 mosques for 8.3 million people, Beijing has 70 for 17 million residents and New York City has 140 for 8.5 million, said the main promoter of the project, Tigran Arutunyan.
In accordance with the plan, special places of prayer would be set aside in city parks for Muslims, making them both accessible for worshippers while also being far away from residential areas.
In addition, the urbanists suggested making the necessary installations collapsible so that they are only assembled for times of the prayer. They would subsequently be decorated with special prayer carpets that worshippers would bring along themselves.
During major religious holidays, the areas could be equipped with a projection screen broadcasting the address of the Imam in the Russia’s capital’s main mosque, located in downtown Moscow.
A senior official of the Spiritual Department of Muslims of European Russia has said that their organization was aware of the plan and was discussing it.
Yelena Tkach, a deputy at a municipal legislature in one of Moscow’s districts, opposes the idea, however, saying that city parks should be used for recreation and not for religious services.
The mosque shortage issue in Moscow once again became apparent last week after about 160,000 people gathered to celebrate the end of the Ramadan fast – the holiday of Uraza-Bairam. Although 10,000 less worshipers came out this year than in 2012, authorities were nonetheless forced to set up dedicated grounds in several...
In 2012 politicians, spiritual leaders and rights activists furiously debated a proposed plan to build more mosques in Moscow. Representatives from Russia’s Muslim community argued that in the absence of officially sanctioned places of worship, adherents could easily fall under the sway of extremists.
Russian nationalists bluntly opposed the plan, saying that migrant workers should leave Russia upon completing their work and there was no need to accommodate their religious needs.
Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin ultimately announced that there were no plans for the construction of new mosques, adding that the 'excessive' number of economic migrants was a ‘harmful thing’.
Isn't it strange how different people have different experiences. I've supported and owned a good number of traditional PCs and laptops over the last decade, running Linux and Windows (XP, 7, and 10), and have hit only one problem - one old system which was upgraded to Windows 10 didn't have drivers for the 8 year old ...
I don't care what a specific software vendor's hardware is "the device to beat" - I use an operating system that just works on what ever device its installed on.
My sixth sense told me there was trouble in paradise but I didn't pay it much heed.
Our relationship was punctuated with accusations and counter-accusations.
Christine Kinyua, 44, has endured emotional abuse, survived a brain tumour, and had a taste of true love, though short-lived. A nurse by profession, she felt the need to run away from heartbreak, negative energy and anything that threatened her peace of mind. She tells her story to Soni Kanake.
"My name is Christine Kinyua, a mother of two and a nurse at MP Shah Hospital, Nairobi. Today, I can confidently say life is good after having navigated several curveballs and healed of the emotional wounds I had sustained along the way.
I got married to a man who accepted my daughter and being young, I figured I had the whole world ahead of me to enjoy life. I was working in Rwanda but my husband and I always made time for each other as I would visit or he would come over.
However, he fell into the habit of always putting me down. He would tell me that I wasn't a good mother and that my daughter had picked negative traits from me. This continued emotional bashing was slowly destroying my soul but at the time all I wanted was for my marriage to work.
We had good times and really bad times. I frequently called home, especially to monitor my daughter's progress who was in the care of her step-dad and nanny. However, I started getting suspicious when I noticed that every evening I called my husband, he would tell me that 'we' are watching movies. Hmmm … Alarm bells we...
My sixth sense told me there was trouble in paradise but I didn't pay it much heed. One day during my visits to Kenya, we were chatting with the house-help when she received a message on her phone from my husband who wanted her to take his suits to the dry-cleaners. So she was shamelessly asking me to get her my husban...
Our relationship was punctuated with accusations and counter-accusations. Every time I was around, there was a fight about a certain girl or suggestive late-night texts. I also realised he did not want people to know he was married because when we went to church, his friends were shocked he had a wife. It wasn't all gl...
We were also keen on saving as a family and I would send him $1,000 (Approxmately Sh80,000) every month for our kitty. I remember once while he was in Kigali I asked him how much we had saved. He stammered and was not forthright and up until today I have no idea what happened to about Sh860,000 I had sent him. My heart...
Before I met him, he had accumulated debt on his credit card but did not mention it. One day while I was in Rwanda, he sent me a text message claiming that he needed a loan for a certain project that was to benefit us as a family. He wanted Sh80,000 and since I hadn't been paid, I was a bit hesitant. He became manipula...
I loved him too much and money was not going to come in between us so after payday, I wired him Sh100,000 only for him to confess later that the money was for his credit card. This new level of betrayal pierced my heart like a sword and I cried until my colleagues thought I had lost someone back home. The pain was surr...
I relocated to Kenya in 2011 but working on our marriage was proving futile as there was always something to fight about. I had opened a clinic but it wasn't doing too well. Meanwhile, I was getting stressed, which was compounded by a nagging headache that was not responding to painkillers.
I sought medical attention but to no avail until one day I decided to have an MRI on my own volition without a doctor's prescription. The results were shocking as they revealed that I had a meningioma (brain tumour) that needed to be removed. Thankfully it was benign and I had a successful surgery late 2015.
Sometimes you have to run to survive and that was what I did when I realised my marriage wasn't working. I decided it was enough and it was time to walk away.
The emotional pain was too much to bear and left me yearning for a place to call home; a place to belong. I remember running from church to church in a bid to find solace. I tried running to the pubs too but the wine did not bring that sense of fulfilment and peace my troubled soul was seeking. I ended up in my sister'...
My daughter was already in boarding school and she did not see me going through the anguish. I remember my friends pushing me to sue my now ex-husband for child support but I did not want to. What if he refused to honour the court orders and I had to keep chasing him to pay up? To save my heart from such agony, I chose...
On the other hand, he still kept tabs on my life. He would visit while I was away and tell the house-girl to inform him on my daily activities. He would write me insulting text messages which I would return with a double dose of hatred until I realised it was draining me emotionally and stopped responding to him.
I had to dig an imaginary grave and bury him so as to move on. I had to forget he existed and realise that my children depended on me. My healing journey was not easy but I was lucky to have understanding and non-judgmental friends who made it easier.
I have documented my life story in a book, Nurse on the Run, which is in book stores, as a way of healing and also to encourage a woman going through what I did.
I found love in February 2017 but unfortunately he was snatched away from me by death in barely a year. He became terminally ill and I was there for him every day until he breathed his last. I guess some things are just kept as memories.
"There is no such thing as a safe abortion because a child dies."
From time to time organizations experience various events that disrupt business and their ability to give service, subsequently impeding revenue streams. The challenge is, knowing when these events will occur and which event is going to occur. Certainly if these variables were known then risk management would not be su...
The ability of your company to efficiently and effectively transition from one step to the other is called ‘Organization Resilience’ thus the question for your consideration is how resilient is your business. Is your organization ready to manage the diverse incidents and events that can disrupt your business? Let’s tak...
From fortifying the location to surveillance systems to pass codes this speaks to both physical and electronic applications designed to safeguard the actual item of value. Not just a glass window but hurricane impact windows. For our purpose this phase also speaks to organization policy regarding culture and behavior.
How secure is your business, if you are a follower of my commentary then you will understand that we are speaking about the multilayered approach to protection concept. Not just the guard at the door, but what is the guard doing while at the door to the robustness of your firewall. The action of asset protection is to ...
The reality is that no matter how good your efforts are ‘Murphy’s Law’ will come about. Thus likelihood must be balanced against consequence and resulting impacts. Essentially how much is spent on fire suppression systems vs. training on how to use it vs. how long does it take to clean up residue.
This component is directly proportional to preparedness, with heavy emphasis placed on training and awareness. The respondents must know their role and what is required of them. During response it is important not to forget the role of the public, thus communications is key. An educated public leads to the next level.
Availability of applicable resources to facilitate timely and realistic recovery of primary operations and services. The impact of the event will very likely determine your ability to recover critical functions. Recovery should not be confused with business resumption, as normalcy usually takes a longer period and may ...
What has been discussed thus far is management system that is intended to help the business to become resilient or improve upon their current status. Based on my experience fundamental in all systems are the operators. As I write this note the world is glued to the television watching the unfolding of the events surrou...
We're only six weeks into the new year, and 2014 is already shaping up to be a fascinating one for a number of networks. It's easy to point to CBS scooping up Thursday-night NFL games and speculate over the upheaval that purchase might bring to the Eyeball's successful comedy block, or what it's going to do to NBC's, u...
(1) Boardwalk Empire, a show that's really grown into its own over the past two years, will conclude after five seasons in the fall of this year.
HBO is touting the end date as if it was dictated by showrunner Terence Winter, and while that absolutely may be true, it's difficult not to assume that HBO might be a little disappointed that Boardwalk didn't grow into the post-Sopranos super-show the network hoped it would when it launched back in 2010. Boardwalk's r...
(2) The Newsroom will conclude its relatively brief and pretty bumpy run with a third season slated to air this fall, probably alongside Boardwalk Empire in some fashion.
Although I'd argue that The Newsroom improved in some moderately important ways in Season 2, it's kind of been a disaster from the beginning, hasn't it? The second season had some weird production issues because Aaron Sorkin scrapped a few storylines, and then HBO took a loooong time to commit to the third and ultimate...
(3) Family Tree and Hello Ladies—two less-heralded but pretty solid comedies—are both dunzo.
This news came out long after HBO's sessions at the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour had concluded, and near the end of a work week at that. It makes sense that HBO wouldn't want to field questions about canceling two freshman offerings, but these moves were surprising nonetheless. Heck, even Enlightene...

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