Dinosaur fossils become big business

She possesses a set of fearsome jaws, is in spectacular condition for her age and would make a striking addition to any drawing room – provided you have one big enough to contain her 33ft-long set of fossilised bones.

Anyone with a seriously large wallet could soon be able to buy this rare, partially complete fossilised skeleton of an Allosaurus, a large carnivorous dinosaur that lived about 150 million years ago and is sometimes referred to as the T. rex of the Jurassic Period – T. rex itself lived much later during a period known as the Cretaceous Period.

The female Allosaurus, discovered in a fossil graveyard in the US state of Wyoming, is one of the prime exhibits going on sale later this year at the French headquarters of Sotheby's in Paris. She is expected to attract huge interest from the growing number of wealthy fossil collectors keen to snap up one of the rarest of dinosaur finds.

driver from www.independent.co.uk

Vampire Diaries: Get Ready for the Rise of Katherine

Once Katherine returned to Mystic Falls in The Vampire Diaries' season finale, it didn't take her long to do some serious damage. Kissing Damon! Stabbing John!

Producers and cast say her tour of destruction has only just begun.

"I would like to see Elena take on Katherine. Elena's gone a long way," Nina Dobrev said at the show's Comic-Con panel Saturday. Despite Elena's evolution over the course of Season 1, Dobrev said it's still nice to step into Katherine's shoes. "She's badass. She gets away with a lot."

Check out all of TVGuide.com's Comic-Con coverage

More important than a possible battle between Elena and Katherine, however, is the conflict ahead for Damon and Stefan, as Katherine tries to pit the Salvatore brothers against each other. In exclusive footage from the new season, Katherine tells Damon that she never loved him, despite their season-finale lip-lock, and tells Stefan that she came back for him.

"This little switcheroo thing is kind of interesting. Katherine fooled Damon, but it will be really interesting to see Katherine and Stefan come face to face," creator and executive producer Kevin Williamson said, noting that the confrontation will take place in the first episode.

Katherine's return may also lead to changes in Damon and Stefan's distinct personalities. That means seeing more of "nice Damon" and the increasingly dark side of Stefan.

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"I think it's a thing that will never escape him," Williamson said. "He's going to have to come to terms with being a vampire and accepting himself for who he is. Part of accepting himself may just be drinking blood."

But no matter how dark Stefan or other characters may get this season, executive producer Julie Plec promises the change isn't necessarily permanent.

"We like to think that the darker a character goes, the closer we get to a window to the light," she said.

Things can't get much darker for Katherine, who murdered John in the final moments of the season finale. Will there be further bloodshed in Mystic Falls at her hands? Williamson would only say there would be more deaths ahead.

"It has to fit for the story," Williamson said of the upcoming fatalities. "It has to come from a place of good storytelling."

Viewers can also expect to learn more about Katherine's origins via flashbacks.

"There's another part of the story we haven't shown you," Williamson said. "It's Chapter 2, but it's also the other side. That's sort of the mystery: Where has she been? What has she been up to?"

driver from www.tvguide.com

Morning Is Coming

Do a thought experiment: Think back a year ago to what most analysts were predicting for the financial sector and for the state of the economy. In his newspaper column, Paul Krugman repeatedly warned that the policies adopted by the Bush and Obama administrations would have dire consequences. There was talk in other corners about no new business lending, slumping retail sales, and rising unemployment with no end in sight.

But here we are—in the midst of a rebound. Each week over the last year, a number of positive and negative economic indicators were announced. From my vantage point, the positive signs (“green shoots”) have been more numerous. Where others saw premonitions of a double-dip recession, I saw the slow revival of the economy. From April of this year to the end of 2011, I predict GDP growth of 3 percent to 5 percent per year and five million net new jobs (about 250,000 jobs a month) from the lowest level of the downturn, along with an unemployment rate of 8 percent. The recovery should continue in 2012 and the unemployment rate should dip below 7 percent by the summer of 2012.

Am I crazy? As of today, here are four important green shoots: First, the upturn in private investment. Declines in investment during recessions are much larger than any other component of the economy. From start of recession through June, 2009, real private investment spending was down 31 percent; since then it is up 16 percent.

Secondly, the rise in inventories. Inventories are very responsive to the business downturns. In 2008 and 2009, inventories fell by nearly $150 billion. In 2010, inventories are rising. Third, business confidence. The latest poll of business owners shows more companies planning to invest now than at any time since the onset of the recession. And fourth, finally, by most accounts, consumer confidence is rising. A survey of the affluent (in households with incomes greater than $90,000) shows a rising number planning on increasing their investments and consumption.

Often, the same people who are pessimistic about the recovery are also pessimistic about the United States keeping its place as the world’s leading economy. They talk in particular of China displacing the United States. This is nonsense. Size matters—we have the largest integrated single market, which permits economies of scale in terms of costs, especially for research, and a greater division of labor that permits specialized services. English is the world language in business and science, and the dollar is the world’s currency. When the global economy is in trouble, investors around the world seek a safe haven in dollar-backed assets.

Our open economy encourages risk tasking; just ask the people behind the formation of 600,000 new businesses each year and the nine million who are self-employed. Because of this, we have a positive inflow of scientists and entrepreneurs—approximately one-quarter of the founders of Silicon Valley startups were non-Americans. And we have a great infrastructure for growth: an educated work force; many of the best universities in the world, which attract lots of foreign talent; access to capital; a good legal system; and an open society that encourages change. Europeans understand that Microsoft, Cisco, Apple, Intel, and the whole Internet revolution could not have started in Europe because businesspeople there are more risk averse and reluctant to build new relationships. And we have a thriving middle class that is ready to move, change jobs, and try new products.
If you look at the American capitalism since World War II, there are ample grounds for optimism. The U.S. economy has experienced almost continuous growth, punctuated by infrequent recessions, from which we have emerged stronger than ever. But the pessimists insist that this recession is different. Here, let me review some of their arguments, and why they are wrong.

First, pessimists like to cite Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s book, This Time is Different, that shows that countries take an unusually long time to recover from the kind of financial crisis we suffered. But their data are based primarily on smaller countries that relied mostly on foreign loans and on pre-World War II data from large industrialized countries. The American economy is larger and has more policy tools available to it than any of the economies they study. From 1985 to 2007, we had a succession of financial crises that seemed to augur deep troubles—from the S&L meltdown and the 1987 stock market crash to the collapse of Long Term Capital Management to the bursting of the dot-com bubble—and we bounced back.

Second, many pessimists point to the decline in jobs in the manufacturing sector and to the absence of well-paying middle-class jobs as an indication the U.S. is living on borrowed time. But throughout the world, the share of employment in manufacturing has fallen sharply because of technological progress—in the U.S., for instance, we make as much coal and raw steel as we did 50 years ago, but require about one-quarter of the number of workers to do so.

Over the last 50 years, the labor force has become increasingly skilled, as the share of workers with some post-secondary education climbed from 20 percent to 60 percent. The pay of these more educated workers has increased relative to those with at most a high school diploma. Most of these people work in offices, hospitals, and schools and not in blue-collar manufacturing jobs. By contrast, the lower-skill service sector has not grown as a percentage of the labor force. What the pessimists take as a sign of decline is really a sign of progress.

Third, the doomsayers point to America’s growing trade deficit. But the benefits of international trade are widespread while the pain is concentrated among specific workers, companies, and regions. I defy anyone to show a negative relationship between rising trade deficits and any indicator of overall employment over the last 30 years. Even in Rust Belt states, overall state output and employment grew significantly from 1980 through 2007. The fear of China and India, two countries with millions of poor peasants, reprises the discredited notion that one country’s gain must come at the cost of another country’s loss.

Fourth, the pessimists cite the extent of personal, business, government, and international indebtedness. Yes, personal debt is high relative to income, but assets (even at today’s reduced levels) have grown faster than debt over the last 20 years. Our international debt looks intimidating, but every prediction of near collapse has failed to be realized. Despite our status as the world’s greatest debtor, the annual flow of capital income into our country has outpaced the payments on our debt for each of last 30 years. And while government debt looks out of control, we can reduce our debt to manageable levels simply by increasing taxes and cutting spending. This may seem like a crazy notion in today’s climate, but who would have predicted Congress bailing out Wall Street with $700 billion dollars?

Let me conclude with a caveat. This economic crisis has had many unexpected shocks that knocked our economy off of its moorings. We’ve had an unprecedented, multitrillion-dollar response from the Federal Reserve and the federal government, and support for further government bailouts is virtually nonexistent. The crisis has also exposed the downside of globalization. We’ve seen that problems can spread with lightning speed across countries so that something that happens in a faraway land could set the world economy tumbling down again. Despite the green shoots, and the history of America quickly rebounding from other recessions since 1945, unexpected events could still slow the recovery. But I think the weight of evidence is on the side of optimism rather than pessimism.

driver from www.tnr.com

Can Scientists Predict Killer Earthquakes?

The date was November 23, 1980. People near Naples in Southern Italy felt the Earth roll and shake. Earthquake! Suddenly buildings came tumbling down. Cracks appeared in the earth. Within minutes, entire towns were destroyed. Thousands of people were dead. Thou-sands more were injured.
As rescuers searched through the rubble, many people must have wondered—if only the victims had known ahead of time, many lives could have been saved.
Actually, an Italian scientist did predict that such a quake would happen. In 1977 Dr. M. Caputo of the University Devils Study in Rome^ warned that a large quake would soon strike the east of Naples. Unfortunately, he couldn't predict the exact time and date of the quake.
Dr. Caputo made his general prediction after talking with scientists at 54 earthquake monitoring stations throughout Italy. He learned that many earthquakes had recently rocked different areas around Naples. But none had occurred in one particular spot the east of Naples for many years. Dr. Caputo felt that the area was long overdue for a large quake. And it
was.
Earthquake strikes in gap
The quake occurred in a region that Dr. Caputo called a seismic gap. A seismic gap is an area in an active earthquake region where no earthquake or seismic activity has been recorded in a long time. Seismic gaps are located where two large plates in the Earth have become stuck.
When the plates slide past each other, they sometimes become locked in place. You land on both feet, the sneakers grab onto rough surface. Friction tends to hold your feet back while the rest of your body goes forward.  You may end up falling flat on your face.
In the case of the plates, however, the uneven surfaces between the plates cause the plates to remain locked in place for years. Huge pressures build up behind each plate. Periodically, a shudder, or tremor, is recorded as some of this energy is released. Finally, after about 50 years, rock in the seismic gap either suddenly breaks or moves under the great stress. This sudden release of energy sends shock waves through the rock layers above. The ground shakes, sidewalks crack, and buildings tumble. A mighty quake has struck.

Researchers who are unfamiliar with the cultural and ethnic groups I they are studying must take extra precautions to shed any biases they bring ith them from their own culture

For example,they must make sure they onstruct measures that are meaningful for each of the cultural or ethnic | inority groups being studied. I

In conducting research on cultural and ethnic minority issues,investi- j ators distinguish between the emic approach and the etic approach. In the mic approach,the goal is to describe behavior in one culture or ethnic j

group in terms that are meaningful and important to the people in that cul¬ ure or ethnic group,without regard to other cultures or ethnic groups. In theetic approach,the goal is to describe behavior so that generalizations can be

made across cultures. If researchers construct a questionnaire in an emic

fashion, their concern is only that the questions are meaningful to the particular culture or ethnic group being studied.If,however,the researchers onstruct a questionnaire in an etic fashion,they want to include questions that reflect concepts familiar to all cultures involved. j

How might the emic and etic approaches be reflected in the study of i family processes? In the emic approach,the researchers might choose to fo- I cus only on middle-class White families,without regard for whether the infor- I mation obtained in the study can be generalized or is appropriate for ethnic mi¬nority groupsJn a subsequent study,the researchers may decide to adopt an etic approach by studying not only middle-class White families,but also lower-in¬come White families,Black American families,Spanish American families,and Asian American families. In studying ethnic minority families,the researchers would likely discover that the extended family is more frequently a support sys¬tem in ethnic minority families than in White American familiesjf so,the emic approach would reveal a different pattern of family interaction than would the etic approach,documenting that research with middle-class White fami¬lies cannot always be generalized to all ethnic groups.

American society is not nap friendly

"In fact," says David Dinges, a sleep specialist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, "There 's even a prohibition against admitting we need sleep. " Nobody wants to be caught napping or found asleep at work. To quote a proverb: "some sleep five hours, nature requires seven, laziness nine and wickedness eleven. "

Wrong. The way not to fall asleep at work is to take naps when you need them. "We have to totally change our attitude toward napping," says Dr. William Dement of Stanford University, the godfather of sleep research.

Last year a national commission led by Dement identified an "American sleep debt"

which one member said was as important as the national debt. The commission was concerned about the dangers of sleepiness, people causing industrial accidents or falling asleep while driving. This may be why we have a new sleep policy in the White House. According to recent reports, President Clinton is trying to take a half-hour snooze (^TBftBi) every afternoon.

About 60 percent of American adults nap when given the opportunity. We seem to have "a mid-afternoon quiet phase," also called "a secondary sleep gate". Sleeping 15 minutes to two hours in the early afternoon can reduce stress and make us refreshed. Clearly, we were born to nap.

We Superstars of Snooze don't nap to replace lost shut-eye or to prepare for a night shift. Rather, we "snack"on sleep, whenever, wherever and at whatever time we feel like it. I myself have napped in buses, cars, planes and on boats; on floors and beds; and in libraries, offices and museums.

The Family of Little Feet

There was a family. All were little. Their arms were little, and their hands were little, and their height was not tall, and their feet very small.

The grandpa slept on the living room couch and snored through his teeth. His feet were fat and doughy like thick tamales, and these he powdered and stuffed into white socks and brown leather shoes.

The grandma's feet were lovely as pink pearls and dressed in velvety high heels that made her walk with a wobble, but she wore them anyway because they were pretty.

The baby's feet had ten tiny toes, pale and see-through like a salamander's, and these he popped into his mouth whenever he was hungry.

The mother's feet, plump and polite, descended like white pigeons from the sea of pillow, across the linoleum roses, down down the wooden stairs, over the chalk hopscotch squares, 5, 6, 7, blue sky.

Do you want this? And gave us a paper bag with one pair of lemon shoes and one red and one pair of dancing shoes that used to be white but were now pale blue. Here, and we said thank you and waited until she went upstairs.

Hurray! Today we are Cinderella because our feet fit exactly, and we laugh at Rachel's one foot with a girl's grey sock and a lady's high heel. Do you like these shoes? But the truth is it is scary to look down at your foot that is no longer yours and see attached a long long leg.

Cultivating Compassion: Moving Out of Your Comfort Zone

I think that many of us these days are trying to figure out how to be more compassionate -- both toward ourselves and others, while also realizing that it's sometimes not that easy to accomplish. It can often feel "easy to be hard," and it seems to really require focus and discipline to be genuinely helpful to others.

Even with the solid intention to develop a more compassionate attitude it can be difficult to know what the most skillful and truly helpful action is in any given situation. I'm sure everybody has had the experience of reaching out and trying to be compassionate only to have the gesture fall flat or actually even backfire.

Perhaps we genuinely want to help someone else but are also interested in maintaining our own comfort or are concerned about how our behavior may appear to and be judged by others. In fact, it is possible that our attempts at compassionate action may actually revolve around our own need for confirmation and comfort and never actually benefit anyone else at all!

An obvious example would be enabling someone to continue to develop destructive habits in exchange for a temporary feel-good moment -- like a parent avoiding a conflict with a rebellious teenager, giving a known drug addict money for "food," or overlooking someone abusing a child to avoid making a scene.

One time a man came up to me on 75th Street and asked for $3.65. He said he needed that exact amount for a bottle of formula for his baby who was at home with his sick wife. If I didn't believe him, he invited me to walk four blocks with him to the nearest pharmacy and buy the formula for him directly. Of course most people in NY have neither the time nor the inclination to take that walk so we are left with basically three choices -- keep walking, call the guy out as a scam artist, or feel guilty and give him all or some of that money.

My teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche coined the phrase "idiot compassion" to describe our attempt to be compassionate when it is not accompanied by wisdom and skillful means. Giving a junkie money for "food" is most likely idiot compassion. Taking him to the store and buying him and handing him real food might not be. The point is that there is no safe, secure and easy way to be compassionate. It's really hard work, time consuming and requires us to be awake and intelligent in each and every situation. There is no compassion button we can just push and forget about.

In the Buddhist tradition compassion can have a wrathful or even ruthless component, maybe comparable to the western notion of "tough love" -- where we summon the courage to deliver that which is actually really helpful in a situation. This kind of love and compassion often can take us well beyond our comfort zone and could be described as opening our heart without hope of gaining merit, gratitude, or any kind of confirmation in return. That kind of selflessness is the way of the bodhisattva, or awakened heart being.

It's always intriguing to hear about real life situations that stretch and test our notion of our "spiritual" values. What would the compassionate thing to do be if this happened... or that happened... Inviting you all to join the conversation -- all anecdotes and compassion conundrums welcome!

Driver from: www.huffingtonpost.com

Mike Pence Explains Why America Can Afford Tax Cuts For The Rich But Not Jobless Aid

Politico's Mike Allen reports in his Playbook today that the new issue of Newsweek will feature a major cover story by Richard Haass called "Rethinking Afghanistan: We're not winning. It's not worth it. Here's how to draw down in Afghanistan."

The article is set to be published on Sunday.

Haass, a well-respected voice on foreign affairs who presides over the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that the Afghan war as it's being prosecuted today is indeed a war of President Obama's choosing, playing off the past remarks of RNC chairman Michael Steele that caused a storm of controversy.

In an excerpt obtained by Allen, Haas writes,

GOP chairman Michael ... Steele's critics are the ones who are wrong: the RNC chair was more correct than not on the substance of his statement, if not the politics. The war being waged by the United States in Afghanistan today is fundamentally different and more ambitious than anything carried out by the Bush administration. Afghanistan is very much Barack Obama's war of choice, a point that the president underscored recently by picking Gen. David Petraeus to lead an intensified counterinsurgency effort there. After nearly nine years of war, however, continued or increased U.S. involvement in Afghanistan isn't likely to yield lasting improvements that would be commensurate in any way with the investment of American blood and treasure. It is time to scale down our ambitions there and both reduce and redirect what we do. ... The war the United States is now fighting in Afghanistan is not succeeding and is not worth waging in this way. The time has come to scale back U.S. objectives and sharply reduce U.S. involvement on the ground. Afghanistan is claiming too many American lives, requiring too much attention, and absorbing too many resources. The sooner we accept that Afghanistan is less a problem to be fixed than a situation to be managed, the better.
Neoconservatives, led by Bill Kristol, called on Steele to resign his chairmanship of the RNC after he questioned the mission in Afghanistan and cast the war as largely unwinnable: "The one thing you don't do is engage in a land war in Afghanistan, alright, because everyone who's tried over a thousand years of history has failed."

The Newsweek cover echoes the efforts of Brave New Films. Director Robert Greenwald has been urging the public and policymakers to draw down the Afghan war with a series of video documentaries entitled "Rethink Afghanistan." Scroll down to watch the latest segment.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton headed to Afghanistan today for a conference in Kabul as part of efforts to refine the goals of the war. Worries about the conflict continue to grow as more American and NATO troops pour into the country after nearly nine years of fighting with no end in sight.

At the Kabul conference, she will renew Washington's commitment to support Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government, but press him to follow through on reform pledges he made earlier this year.

Richard Holbrooke, President Barack Obama's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, has said the conference "will be a very important international demonstration of support" for Karzai and his administration.

But Holbrooke acknowledges concerns that the war and the reconstruction effort are not going as hoped or planned.

He told Congress this past week that "there are significant elements of movement forward in many areas, but I do not yet see a definitive turning point in either direction."

Last month was the deadliest of the war for international forces: 103 coalition troops were killed, despite the infusion of tens of thousands of new U.S. troops.

The word conservation has a thrifty meaning

To conserve is to save and protect, to leave what we ourselves enjoy in such good condition that others may also share the enjoyment. Our forefathers had no idea that human population would increase faster than the supplies of raw materials; most of them, even until very recently, had the foolish idea that the treasures were "limitless" and "inexhaustible". Most of the citizens of earlier generations knew little or nothing about the complicated and delicate system that runs all through nature, and which means that, as in a living body, an unhealthy condition of one part will sooner or later be harmful to all the others.

Fifty years ago nature study was not part of the school work; scientific forestry was a new idea; timber was still cheap because it could be brought in any quantity from distant woodlands soil destruction and river floods were not national problems; nobody had yet studied long-term climatic cycles in relation to proper land use; even the word "conservation" had nothing of the meaning that it has for us today.

For the sake of ourselves and those who will come after us, we must now set about repairing the mistakes of our forefathers. Conservation should, therefore, be made a part of everyone's daily life. To know about the water table(ifeT7jC'&)in the ground is just as important to us as a knowledge of the basic arithmetic formulas. We need to know why all watersheds(7X^)need the protection of plant life and why the running current of streams and rivers must be made to yield their full benefit to the soil before they finally escape to the sea. We need to be taught the duty of planting trees as well as of cutting them. We need to know the importance of big, mature trees, because living space for most of man's fellow creatures on this planet is figured not only in square measure of surface but also in cubic volume above the earth. In brief, it should be our goal to restore as much of the original beauty of nature as we can.