Yeah, it's kinda like that today
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Grover Norquist is trouble with a capital T. As you can see, he has a beard. And he’s showing signs of converting to islam himself, he’s married a muslim woman. But he denies that he’s converted himself.
In recent weeks, the U.S. Embassy has become aware of an increasing number of incidents at or near the Giza Pyramids. The majority of these incidents are attributed to over-aggressive vendors, though the degree of aggressiveness in some cases is closer to criminal conduct. Other more serious incidents have been reported involving vehicles nearing the Pyramids, with angry groups of individuals surrounding and pounding on the vehicles – and in some cases attempting to open the vehicle’s doors. While the motive is less clear (possibly related to carriage operators wanting fares), it has severely frightened several visitors. A common theme from many of these reports is the lack of visible security or police in the vicinity of the Pyramids. U.S. citizens should elevate their situational awareness when traveling to the Pyramids, avoid any late evening or night travel, utilize a recommended or trusted guide, and closely guard valuables.While expats in the region say that the US embassy often “overblows” the threat, in this case, the associate provost at the American University in Cairo, said the threat was warranted, and he issued an even sterner warning on his blog:
It’s getting really bad out there. I’ve been going off and on for 13 years, whenever a visitor is in town. So I’m pretty tough when it comes to dealing with the normal scams to which my tourist friends are subjected at the Pyramids. I’ve dealt with corrupt police, and I’ve dealt with a jerk Bedouin pretending to become very angry when I told him $100 for my friend to ride a camel for 15 minutes was ridiculous (he grabbed my shirt and screamed theatrically in my face as a police officer laughed nearby).So, it’s not like I’m easily scared by anything that happens at the Pyramids, that repository for all of Egypt’s most villainous swindlers (every nation has some). But in recent months it has become almost unbearable. It feels almost like an openly criminal environment now. The problem is not only “lack of visible security,” but in some cases the security are either working with the vendors on their scams, or are sexually harassing female foreigners quite openly, even those who are obviously accompanied by their husbands.
The Great Sphinx’s face with a set of pyramids in the background and a beautiful purple sunset sky day in Giza, Cairo, Egypt
[T]he evaluation of the safety and security environment has dropped to the lowest position of all countries covered in the Report (140th).This is awful news for Egypt’s tourist industry, that’s suffered over the years, first from terrorism, then from the recent political unrest. All of this led to fewer tourists:
Tourist numbers have fallen, from 14 million in 2010 to 10.2 million in 2011, and 10.5 million for 2012. The good news is that, after a sluggish start, total numbers for 2012 picked up with a strong surge toward the end of the year.Tourism is a huge part of the Egyptian economy. CNN reports that the tourism industry employs 18 million people in Egypt, which is an insane number. And tourism brought in more than $10 billion in 2012. So the news of the pyramids becoming increasingly unsafe, and the guards being either in cahoots with the criminals, or simply not caring, isn’t going to help.
They analysed more than a billion tweets posted during various American sporting events, including the 2013 Super Bowl, to the test whether being accurate or being confident made Twitter users more popular.
Despite professional pundits and amateur fans making a similar amount of correct and incorrect predictions, the tweeters who 'yelled' louder were seen as more trustworthy and had more followers.
To test the theory, two economic students from the university studied the language used by sports pundits who often 'yell' for attention.
Jadrien Wooten and Ben Smith compared the tweets of professional pundits - celebrities with verified Twitter accounts - with amateur tweeters that claimed to have some sports expertise in their bio. […]
Words like 'vanquish,' 'destroy' and 'annihilate' posted in Tweets were considered to be confident words.
The researchers used these confident words in place of being able to measure loudness online.
The research found that the professionals were correct with their predictions 47 per cent of the time.
Whereas the amateurs made accurate predictions in 45 per cent of cases.
However, the professionals were more confident, scoring a .480 confidence rating compared to the amateurs' .313.
If a professional pundit accurately predicted every game of the baseball playoffs and series, the authors estimated his or her Twitter following would increase 3.4 per centr
While an amateur would get 7.3 per cent more followers.
A confident professional would increase his or her following by nearly 17 per cent, whereas a 'loud' amateur would get 20 per cent more followers.
A Nova Scotia high school has created a curriculum where every subject — from physics to design technology to dance — centres on hockey.
Cole Harbour District High School, in Sidney Crosby's hometown, received special recognition from Hockey Canada this week for its special project, which encompasses all subjects in all grades.
AN ATOM'S electrons are an ever-shifting quantum melee, but it turns out you can still take their photograph as if they were standing still. A quantum-style microscope has imaged the hydrogen atom's wave function, the equation that determines its electrons' positions – and in turn the atom's properties. [...]Lisa Grossman of New Scientist explains: Here.
how on earth do you make an image of such an object? Measuring the position of a single electron "collapses" the wave function, forcing it to pick a particular position, but that alone is not representative of its normal, quantum presence in the atom. "Wave functions are difficult to measure. They're exquisite quantum objects that change their appearance upon observation," says Aneta Stodolna of the FOM Institute AMOLF in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Her team decided to make a picture using a technique dreamed up 30 years ago that can be thought of as a quantum microscope. Rather than taking an image of a single atom, they sampled a bunch of atoms. This removes the quantum nature of each individual atom's electron, forcing it to choose a particular location from those it is allowed to reside in. Do it with enough atoms and the number choosing each spot will reflect the quantum probabilities laid out by the wave function.
An archaic bird known as Aurornis xui, described this week in the journal Nature by paleontologist Pascal Godefroit and colleagues, is the latest entry in the debate over which animal qualifies as the first bird and how birds evolved.Brian Switek of National Geographic explains: Here.
The delicately preserved specimen, which includes fossil remnants of feathers, was discovered in the roughly 160-million-year-old rock of China's Tiaojishan Formation. While Aurornis lived about ten million years earlier thanArchaeopteryx, and very far from the prehistoric European archipelago thatArchaeopteryx inhabited, the new study found that the two plumage-covered creatures were close relatives at the very base of bird evolution.