Answers From presents appeal from Australian engineer. Magnetic Perpetual Motion device with calculations and disign drowings for all who interested. Australian engineer appeals to the world: “I think I’ve invented a perpetual motion device. I did this seven years ago but have been too embarrassed to go against everything I have understood as scientific fact, to go public. I believe I’ve shown that it works on paper – but I know it can’t work. Clearly I did something wrong. I approached a fellow engineer; I gave him the parameters and asked that he do some analysis; I didn’t give him the results. He analysed and came up with the same results. The challenge I pose is this: Please look at what I’ve done and tell me why it wouldn’t work. [Follow the Calculations Link to check my work, follow the Independent Verification Link to check the computer analysis]. Surely there are scientists and mathematicians that ... Read the rest of this post
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By: Elena Ornig,
on 5/23/2011
Blog: Anwers from digital publisher (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: design, PUBLISHING, Answers, documents, calculations, Add a tag
By: Lauren,
on 4/27/2011
Blog: OUPblog (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: US, Media, iraq war, homeland security, Military, foreign policy, Thought Leaders, gitmo, Guantanamo, *Featured, Law & Politics, documents, terrorists, WikiLeaks, vacuum, greenberg, classified, insufficient, pow, national security, karen greenberg, the least worst place, guantánamo, detainees, hearsay, Add a tag
By Karen Greenberg
The most amazing fact about the more than 700 previously unseen classified Guantánamo documents released by WikiLeaks and several unaffiliated news organizations the night of Sunday, April 24, is how little in them is new. The information in these documents — admittedly not classified “top secret” but merely “secret” — spells out details that buttress what we already knew, which is this: From day one at Guantánamo, the U.S. national security apparatus has known very little about the detainees in custody. The United States does not know who they are, how to assess what they say, and what threat they ultimately pose.
Given this vacuum of ignorance, U.S. officials decided at the outset that it was better to be safe than sorry. Therefore, any imaginable way in which behavior or statements could be deemed dangerous led to individual detainees being classified as “high risk.” The result was the policy we have seen since 2002 — a policy of assessing potential danger based on details like what kind of watches the detainees wore, the way they drew on the dirt floors of their cages, and whether they had travel documents on them. In addition, the just-released documents reaffirm the fact that much of the material on the detainees apparently came from hearsay derived from what seems to have been a limited number of interrogations, some performed under circumstances amounting to torture.
It is not just the conclusions of Guantánamo critics like myself that are being verified by these newly found documents. The conclusions of the judges who have sifted through available information to determine just who deserves to be at Guantánamo and who is being held on the basis of insufficient evidence have also been reinforced. In 58 habeas cases spanning both George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s administrations, federal judges have determined that in 36 of the cases there is insufficient evidence to hold these individuals and that often the detention was based on information obtained through hearsay, frequently the result of torture. In other words, the little evidence that existed was largely unreliable.
The sad fact is that these documents tell us more about ourselves than about the detainees. They tell us that U.S. officials to this day know very little based on hard evidence about the majority of those who have been held at Guantánamo, that assessments of risk have all too often been based on flights of imagination that tend to enhance the sense of power and capability of al Qaeda, and that the criteria for determining risk are at best murky. Those deemed to pose a risk ranged from individual detainees who proclaimed angry threats against their guards to those who were believed to have been actively involved in terrorism.
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once pointed out, in reference to the failure to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Although the quip may seem facile, it is actually a candid assessment of what has gone wrong at Guantánamo from the time it opened in January 2002. It continues to go wrong to this day. The proper, lawful, most security-minded restatement of Rumsfeld’s maxim would be this: Absence of evidence requires better intelligence, more careful judgments, and more savvy realism. Without facts, it is not only the just treatment of detainees that is at issue — it is the security of the United States itself.
Karen Greenberg is executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law and author of 0 Comments on Inside the vacuum of ignorance as of 1/1/1900
By: Lauren,
on 9/20/2010
Blog: OUPblog (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: applicants, documents, identification, passport, Craig Robertson, passports, inches, bearer, History, American History, photographs, A-Featured, A-Editor's Picks, photograph, ID, Add a tag
Craig Robertson is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. His new book, The Passport in America: The History of A Document, examines how “proof of identity” became so crucial in America. Through addressing questions of identification and surveillance, the history of the passport is revealed. In the excerpt below we learn about photographs on passports.
On 21 December 1914, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan issued an order requiring two unmounted photographs no larger than three inches by three inches to be submitted with passport applications – one attached to the application, the second to be put on the passport. Citizens who had been issued passports without photographs were required to have a photograph added. Photographs were introduced to make the passport a more accurate identification document in a time of war. The use of the passport in the name of national security also brought with it an increased concern to make the document more secure. Less than a month after adding photographs to passports, the State Department acknowledged the need to more effectively ensure that the correct photograph was connected to the correct document. When applications were submitted to local courthouses, clerks were now requested to affix photographs to the application with a seal to avoid subsequent substitution of the photograph prior to the issuance of a passport. In Washington and at embassies around the world, officials stamped their seal of their office over the top left corner of the photograph when they attached it to the passport instead of the initial practice of simply pasting it to the document. In addition to being an attempt to secure the passport, the legend made explicit the purpose of the photograph and the authority the legitimized the identification process. The legend stated: “This is to certify that the photograph attached hereto is a likeness of the person to whom this passport is issued. In witness whereof the seal of the Department of State is impressed upon the photograph.” In 1928, as part of continuing attempts to make the passport a more secure document, the State Department began to use a machine that perforated a legend across the lower part of the photograph after it was attached to a passport. This made it more difficult for someone to cleanly remove the photograph, and it was assumed to be more difficult to replicate than the rubber stamp.
All of this effort was necessary because officials considered the photograph to be an authoritative likeness of a person – hence their concern that a substituted photograph would allow someone to easily claim the citizenship and identity the state had intended for someone else. The concern with fraud led officials to employ the relatively less “accurate” identification technologies of the signature and the physical description to further ensure the photograph on the passport was indeed that of the person the State Department had issued the passport to. Officials reduced the categories in the physical description to height, hair, and eyes, but as noted retained the recently added category for “distinguishing marks.” From 1924 applicants had to sign the back of the passport photograph. According to a State Department publication, this signature “provided a written record to identify the rightful bearer in the passport, reduced the possibility of fraud, and insured that the proper photograph was attached to the application and the passport.”
During the 1920s the State Department also clarified its policy to ensure that all passports carried a photograph of the bearer. In 1921 the secretary of
By: Rebecca,
on 7/7/2008
Blog: OUPblog (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Medical Mondays, court, David Michaels, doubt, heaht, secrecy, agreements, hazards, judges, documents, sealed, courts, Health, Law, Add a tag
David Michaels is a scientist and former government regulator. During the Clinton Administration, he served as Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environment, Safety and Health, responsible for protecting the health and safety of the workers, neighboring communities, and the environment surrounding the nation’s nuclear weapons factories. He currently directs the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy at The George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services. His most recent book, Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health explains how many of the scientists who spun science for tobacco have become practitioners in the lucrative world of product defense. Whatever the story- global warming, toxic chemicals, sugar and obesity, secondhand smoke- these scientists generate studies designed to make dangerous exposures appear harmless. Earlier today we excerpted from the introduction to the book, the excerpt below is from Michaels recommendations to reform the courts’ role in our public health system.
Courts are a repository of large amounts of information that is potentially important in public health protection. Every chapter of this book contains material that was uncovered during the discovery process in a legal proceeding: documents that prove industry campaigns to manufacture uncertainty; others that prove corporate knowledge of significant health hazards years, if not decades, before they were acknowledged; and vital scientific studies that should have been in the literature but were hidden by their corporate sponsors. It is almost always in the public’s interest to place these documents in the public domain, but defendants, who want to avoid bad publicity and the encouragement of additional lawsuits, are often willing to offer the plaintiff a more generous settlement in return for secrecy. Seduced by the larger settlements, plaintiffs and their attorneys have little incentive to oppose the practice, and judges benefit by clearing their dockets of complex, time-consuming litigation. So the deal is done, and the documents are sealed from public view, sequestered forever. The loser is society. Secrecy diminishes our ability to both identify public health and safety hazards and prevent further harm.
Protective orders and secrecy agreements have hidden critical evidence of hazards associated with dozens of materials, products, and processes: automobiles, medicines, child car seats, BB guns, toys, cigarette lighters, 
school lunch tables, water slides, and many more. No price is paid by the parties involved to the contrary, it is a win-win deal for them—while the public and regulators are left in the dark. Secrecy agreements are a nefarious practice, and the courts have the means of limiting if not eradicating them. Some do so. The judges of the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina have issued rules ‘‘disfavoring court-ordered secrecy in cases affecting public safety,’’ but they appear to be in the minority on the federal bench. Judges in toxic tort cases may consider this issue in approving secrecy agreements, but such consideration does not carry the day often enough.
How could the courts put some teeth into rules to discourage the sealing of important documents? Dan Givelber, former dean of the Northeastern University School of Law, and Tony Robbins, former head of NIOSH, the U.S. National Vaccine Program, and two state health departments, have coauthored an intriguing proposal. They suggest that, if harm has been caused by a hazard that was the subject of previously sealed documents, a jury could use that earlier secrecy agreement as good cause for assessing punitive damages in this later case. With such a rule in place, secrecy agreements would not be a risk-free default position; for hiding the truth, the corporation could pay a steep price the next time around.
Ending this practice will come down to the judges and the rules established for them. It is their responsibility to protect the public. They should do so.
By: Neil Gaiman,
on 2/16/2008
Blog: Neil Gaiman (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Dracula, two plays for voices, two plays for voices, Rhyming, Dracula, Add a tag
Today I've been playing Amanda Palmer's song Oasis and the Bonzo Dogs' new song Beautiful People, more or less over and over, like some kind of weird A and B side. (That's a reference for the very old.)
I was wondering where I might be able to find a copy of the "Snow Glass Apples" which appeared on scifi.com's "Seeing Eye Theatre" as SET has been removed from the scifi website.
Thanks,
Matthew
Interesting... and a bit mysterious. I figured I'd be able to point you to lots of places that had it up, as I did the last time someone asked. But no. It's vanished from the Scifi.com site, it's vanished from iTunes, it's vanished from Audible.com, and even the stuff you used to be able to listen to here on this site has vanished as well.
The Audie-award winning CD of Two Plays For Voices (which contains Bebe Neuwirth starring in Snow Glass Apples, Brian Dennehy starring in Murder Mysteries) is still available for as long as it stays in print (here's the Amazon link) (here's the DreamHaven link). Right now that's the only way to legitimately listen to it.
(Look, Dreamhaven have Mirrormask toys on sale.)
I'm not quite sure who the rights owner is for the online versions of Snow Glass Apples or Murder Mysteries, to be honest. Probably the SciFi channel. And if they're no longer hosting the marvellous Seeing Ear Theatre material they did I wish they'd put it up somewhere like Last FM, or at Audible, so that people could hear it...
(In a box in my basement are a hundred or so cassette copies of Two Plays for Voices that Harpers remaindered and that I bought thinking they were CDs.)
I noticed that Amazon has put up a page for "Odd and the Frost Giants":
http://www.amazon.com/Odd
I just wanted to make sure that this wasn't a mistake before I cancel my order from Amazon UK.
Thanks
-Kevin
According to Harper Collins, it's a mistake on Amazon's part. It won't be coming out in the US until at least 2009.
thanks,
Erick
This one is better. It's been annotated by Les Klinger, who did the amazing Annotated Sherlock Holmes collections a few years back. I've read it, and have seen a few designed pages, and it's a remarkable piece of work.
...
Oh, and the "nothing rhymes with Neil Gaiman" thing. Alan Moore said that. I didn't.
But those of you who are writing in to point out that "simon" or "rhymin'" or "hymen" rhyme with Gaiman are simply wrong. Honest.
Among the ones that came in and did rhyme (and there have been about a dozen so far) this one, by Anna Lawrence, stood out...
In re 'rhymes':
Whose books were beloved of the layman
But the story turned horrider
On a trip down to Florida
When his leg was bit off by a cayman.
... I'm sorry about that, but it had to be done.
Not a problem. If we gave no-prizes, you could have one. Would you like a cassette of Two Plays for Voices? (Anna only omitted "stamen" and "daemon", two other words popular with today's poetic correspondents.)
...
I wrote the end of Chapter 8 today. Then I went back and started writing a couple of scenes from Chapter 7 I skipped while I was writing it, so the book isn't quite finished. But it sort of almost is.