Sunday, November 06, 2005

introduction and description to meetup.com

This is an e-mail to the syndic8 group about meetup.com which seems to be gaining popularity by "meeting people together." Groups of people are formed by location, topic, both.

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Maunsell Towers

About WWII defense towers constructed within the Thames Estuary area in 1942. They are still standing today. Their purpose was to house anti-aircraft batteries. There ar very good pictures of these towers on the Website.

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Amazon and Google rush to sell parts of books online

In a race to become the iTunes of the publishing world, Amazon.com and Google are both developing systems to allow consumers to purchase online access to any page, section or chapter of a book.

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Saturday, November 05, 2005

The ASME's Top 40 Magazine Covers

The American Society of Magazine Editors chose their Top 40 magazine covers.
First is the January 22, 1981 issue of THE ROLLING STONE with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.


Top 40 Covers

Friday, November 04, 2005

Michael Brown's e-mails made public

The emails former FEMA head Michael Brown wrote during the Katrina crises have been made public.

"Can I quit now? Can I come home?" Brown wrote to Cindy Taylor, FEMA's deputy director of public affairs, the morning of the hurricane.

On August 26, just days before Katrina made landfall, Brown e-mailed his press secretary, Sharon Worthy, about his attire, asking: "Tie or not for tonight? Button-down blue shirt?"

A few days later, Worthy advised Brown: "Please roll up the sleeves of your shirt, all shirts. Even the president rolled his sleeves to just below the elbow. In this [crisis] and on TV you just need to look more hard-working."





Thursday, November 03, 2005

sharing business data with xml extensions

More types of security data are bring shared. The Global Justice Extensible Markup Language Data Model is used to tag criminal and public safety data so it can be shared effectively.

Another extension is the Electronic Business XML (EbXML) which is a modular suite of specifications.
The United Nations was the early champion of this concept to streamline international transactions.

The United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business promotes EbXML and you can find out more by visiting www.unece.org/cefact.

OASIS devotes a special link for e-government business.



Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Vampirism presentation

....the evolutionary explanation for the existence of vampire, and the argument for genetic tweaking to create more vampires, backed up with real biology.







mystery object identified

A mysterious object found in a Davenport, Iowa home was not a bomb, at first thought.
It is a device that is suposed to scare off aliens living underground. Th device was examined by the local bomb squad and an evacuation of the area was done as police investigated.