Name: Norman Anthony Aguero
Currently a student at FIU. My major is chemistry and my minor is physics. My goal is to hopefully earn a Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry.
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Yikes! It's Ike!
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Scientists working on the world's biggest machine are being besieged by phone calls and emails from people who fear the world will end next Wednesday, when the gigantic atom smasher starts up.
The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, where particles will begin to circulate around its 17 mile circumference tunnel next week, will recreate energies not seen since the universe was very young, when particles smash together at near the speed of light.
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Such is the angst that the American Nobel prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has even had death threats, said Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University, adding: "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t---."
The head of public relations, James Gillies, says he gets tearful phone calls, pleading for the £4.5 billion machine to stop.
"They phone me and say: "I am seriously worried. Please tell me that my children are safe," said Gillies.
Emails also arrive every day that beg for reassurance that the world will not end, he explained.
Others are more aggressive. "There are a number who say: "You are evil and dangerous and you are going to destroy the world."
"I find myself getting slightly angry, not because people are getting in touch but the fact they have been driven to do that by what is nonsense. What we are doing is enriching humanity, not putting it at risk."
There have also been legal attempts to halt the start up.
The remarkable outpouring of concern about turning on the experiment, the most ambitious in history, comes as a new report concludes that it poses no threat to mankind.
Since 1994, when the collider was first mooted by the multi-national European nuclear research organisation (CERN), dogged doomsayers have claimed that there would be a small but real risk that an unstoppable cataclysm would take place.
Many of the emails received by Gillies cite a gloomy book - Our Final Century?: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century? - written by Lord Rees, astronomer royal and president of the Royal Society.
"My book has been misquoted in one or two places," Lord Rees said yesterday. "I would refer you to the up-to-date safety study."
The new report published today provides the most comprehensive evidence available to confirm that nature's own cosmic rays regularly produce more powerful particle collisions than those planned within the LHC.
The LHC Safety Assessment Group has reviewed and updated a study first completed in 2003, which dispels fears of universe-gobbling black holes and of other possibly dangerous new forms of matter, and confirms that the switch-on will be safe.
The report, 'Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions', published in the Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics, proves that if particle collisions at the LHC had the power to destroy the Earth, we would never have been given the chance to worry about the LHC, because regular interactions with more energetic cosmic rays would already have destroyed the Earth.
The Safety Assessment Group writes, "Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth - and the planet still exists."
The Group compares the rates of cosmic rays that bombard Earth to show that hypothetical black holes or strangelets, that have raised fears in some, will pose no threat.
As the Group writes, "Each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes, so any black hole produced would be much smaller than those known to astrophysicists." They also say that such microscopic black holes could not grow dangerously.
As for the equally hypothetical strangelets, the review uses recent experimental measurements at the Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider, New York, to prove that they will not be produced in the LHC.
The collider is designed to seek out new particles including the long-awaited Higgs boson responsible for making things weigh what they do, the possible source of gravity called dark matter, as well as probe the differences between matter and antimatter.
Sudden death after arrest may be new syndrome
By Ben Hirschler Tue Sep 2, 1:05 PM ET
MUNICH (Reuters) - Young men who die suddenly after being arrested by the police may be victims of a new syndrome similar to one that kills some wild animals when they are captured, Spanish researchers said on Tuesday.
Manuel Martinez Selles of Madrid's Hospital Gregorio Maranon reached the conclusion after investigating 60 cases of sudden unexplained deaths in Spain following police detention.
In one third of the cases, death occurred at the point of arrest, while in the remainder death was within 24 hours, Selles told the annual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology.
All but one of the casualties were male and their average age was just 33 years, with no previous history of cardiovascular disease.
"Something unusual is going on," Sells said.
Just why they died remains a mystery but he believes young men, in particular, may experience surges in blood levels of chemicals known as catecholamines when under severe stress.
Adrenaline is one of the most abundant catecholamines.
"We know that when a wild animal is captured, sometimes the animal dies suddenly," he said.
"Probably when these young males are captured it is very stressful and their level of catecholamines goes very high and that can finish their life by ventricular fibrillation (cardiac arrest)."
Selles compiled his study -- the first of its kind in any country -- by scouring Spanish newspapers for cases of unexplained death after police detention over the past 10 years.
Only sudden deaths with no clear causes were included and autopsy reports were checked to exclude the possibility of mistreatment or past serious medical conditions.
Twelve of the victims were drug users but Selles said this was not thought to have contributed to their deaths.
Jonathan Halperin of the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, who was not involved in the research, said the concept of a heart stress syndrome triggered by a flood of adrenaline or other chemicals was "a reasonable hypothesis."
"We all know stress is bad for you and this may be stress in the extreme," he said.
(Editing by Giles Elgood)
Drop in solar activity has potential effect for climate on earth.
The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.
The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots -- is an influencing factor for climate on earth.
According to data from Mount Wilson Observatory, UCLA, more than an entire month has passed without a spot. The last time such an event occurred was June of 1913. Sunspot data has been collected since 1749.
Drop in solar activity has potential effect for climate on earth.
The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.
The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots -- is an influencing factor for climate on earth.
According to data from Mount Wilson Observatory, UCLA, more than an entire month has passed without a spot. The last time such an event occurred was June of 1913. Sunspot data has been collected since 1749.
When the sun is active, it's not uncommon to see sunspot numbers of 100 or more in a
When the sun is active, it's not uncommon to see sunspot numbers of 100 or more in a single month. Every 11 years, activity slows, and numbers briefly drop to near-zero. Normally sunspots return very quickly, as a new cycle begins.
But this year -- which corresponds to the start of Solar Cycle 24 -- has been extraordinarily long and quiet, with the first seven months averaging a sunspot number of only 3. August followed with none at all. The astonishing rapid drop of the past year has defied predictions, and caught nearly all astronomers by surprise.
In 2005, a pair of astronomers from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson attempted to publish a paper in the journal Science. The pair looked at minute spectroscopic and magnetic changes in the sun. By extrapolating forward, they reached the startling result that, within 10 years, sunspots would vanish entirely. At the time, the sun was very active. Most of their peers laughed at what they considered an unsubstantiated conclusion.
The journal ultimately rejected the paper as being too controversial.
The paper's lead author, William Livingston, tells DailyTech that, while the refusal may have been justified at the time, recent data fits his theory well. He says he will be "secretly pleased" if his predictions come to pass.
But will the rest of us? In the past 1000 years, three previous such events -- the Dalton, Maunder, and Spörer Minimums, have all led to rapid cooling. One was large enough to be called a "mini ice age". For a society dependent on agriculture, cold is more damaging than heat. The growing season shortens, yields drop, and the occurrence of crop-destroying frosts increases.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts, who runs a climate data auditing site, tells DailyTech the sunspot numbers are another indication the "sun's dynamo" is idling. According to Watts, the effect of sunspots on TSI (total solar irradiance) is negligible, but the reduction in the solar magnetosphere affects cloud formation here on Earth, which in turn modulates climate.
This theory was originally proposed by physicist Henrik Svensmark, who has published a number of scientific papers on the subject. Last year Svensmark's "SKY" experiment claimed to have proven that galactic cosmic rays -- which the sun's magnetic field partially shields the Earth from -- increase the formation of molecular clusters that promote cloud growth. Svensmark, who recently published a book on the theory, says the relationship is a larger factor in climate change than greenhouse gases.
Solar physicist Ilya Usoskin of the University of Oulu, Finland, tells DailyTech the correlation between cosmic rays and terrestrial cloud cover is more complex than "more rays equals more clouds". Usoskin, who notes the sun has been more active since 1940 than at any point in the past 11 centuries, says the effects are most important at certain latitudes and altitudes which control climate. He says the relationship needs more study before we can understand it fully.
Other researchers have proposed solar effects on other terrestrial processes besides cloud formation. The sunspot cycle has strong effects on irradiance in certain wavelengths such as the far ultraviolet, which affects ozone production. Natural production of isotopes such as C-14 is also tied to solar activity. The overall effects on climate are still poorly understood.
What is incontrovertible, though, is that ice ages have occurred before. And no scientist, even the most skeptical, is prepared to say it won't happen again.
Article Update, Sep 1 2008. After this story was published, the NOAA reversed their previous decision on a tiny speck seen Aug 21, which gives their version of the August data a half-point. Other observation centers such as Mount Wilson Observatory are still reporting a spotless month. So depending on which center you believe, August was a record for either a full century, or only 50 years.
The real reason 'behind'McCain's choice for a running mate:
| Divine lightning reaction? |
A Chinese man who swore to God that he didn't owe money to a neighbour was hit by lightning a minute later.
The man, named Xu, made the oath in front of a crowd of neighbours in Fuqing city, reports Southeast Express.
He vowed that he had never borrowed money from Mr Huang, who claimed Xu borrowed 500 yuan, the equivalent of £40, from him three years earlier.
"He borrowed 500 yuan three years ago from me for a friend's marriage gift, but he has denied it ever since then," said Huang, who went to Xu's home to demand payment.
"I told him that if he dared to swear to God that he didn't owe me the money, then I would waive his debt," said Huang.
Xu made the oath, but was suddenly struck by lightning a minute later.
He was immediately taken to hospital where doctors confirmed he had been hit by lightning. He is expected to make a full recovery.
"Today, if you ask a car dealer to let you see something for 10 grand, he'll show you the door!"
"Medical insurance is what allows people to be ill at ease!"
"Prison inmates are treated to cable TV, hot meals and a college education, while on the outside some people can only afford these things through a life of crime!"
"Thank's to the new welfare bill, the question "Paper or plastic?" now refers to many American's sleeping arrangements!"
"In retrospect it becomes clear that hindsight is definitely overrated!"
"Most people are so lazy, they don't even exercise good judgement!"
"If opera is entertainment, then falling off a roof is transportation!"
"A college jock is someone who minds his build instead of vice versa!"
"The only advantage to living in the past is that the rents are much cheaper!"
"Getting old is when a narrow waist and a broad mind change places!"
"How come stealing from one book is plagiarism, but stealing from many is research?"
"It takes one to know one -- and vice versa!"
"Nowadays, a balanced diet is when every McNugget weighs the same!"
"Teenagers are people who act like babies if they're not treated like adults!"
"A teacher is someone who talks in our sleep!"
"How come we choose from just two people for President, and fifty for Miss America?"
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!"
"You can be on the right track and still get hit by a train!"
"Blood is thicker than water... but it makes lousy lemonade!"
"The U.N. is a place where governments opposed to free speech demand to be heard!"
"A plastic surgeon's office the only place where no one gets offended when you pick your nose!"
Telegenisys India Pvt. Ltd. specializes in "business process outsourcing" for medium-sized companies worldwide, and they boast a singular vision -- to one day achieve the SEVEN F'S of customer service. In no particular order, these f-words are Focused, Fast, Flexible, Friendly, Fair, Futuristic and First Class! Business process outsourcing is a euphemism for lowballing bids on jobs like engineering, tech support, customer service or animation, and setting up "call centers" in countries like India, China, Egypt, and the Philippines.
Apart from movies and television, America's premiere exports are overindulgence, depression, premature death and regime change. There's no better way than to enjoy all of the above than working in an overpopulated Indian call center. India, crowned by businesses around the globe as the world's back office, employs 350,000 people in the outsourcing industry each year, adding 150,000 new jobs every twelve months. Just imagine them all stuffed in one single cubicle clonking phones together and you begin to approximate the sensation. The average call center can house fifteen hundred 20-year-old Indian technology graduates.
When a business in the United States hands over all its call center jobs to workers in India, it means that young Indians will be on the telephone with you a great deal: answering your customer service questions, troubleshooting your software problems and assisting you with credit card inquiries from thousands of miles away. Similar outsourcing corporations exist here in America, but the majority of jobs go to domestic incarcerated prisoners.
Because of the time difference between India and the United States, Indian employees work graveyard shifts, arriving at the office in the early evening (6:30pm) and returning home shortly before dawn (3:30am). The adjustment to such odd hours is hitting India hard, and carrying with it a host of health problems: digestive disease, hair loss, back pain and stress to name just a few. An estimated 50,000 young English-speaking Indians have already been exposed to the phenomenon of accent stress.
In hundreds of classrooms across India, instructors from as far away as the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business and Britain's Oxford University have set up workshops which serve to neutralize an Indian's accent before he or she ever touches a telephone. It can take weeks to teach someone how to "flatten out" their Indian intonations, to pronounce Pottery Barn more like Poddery Barn. Accent-neutralization classes incorporate a whole toolbox of geography lessons, regional dialects, and shorthand introductions to American culture -- including holidays and baseball scores. Some Indians are asked to act out Western fairy tales, perform Shakespeare, and examine popular caricatures of Indians like Apu from The Simpsons.
Have you ever tried faking an English accent for eight to ten hours a day? What a pain in the ass. You get a sore throat that never heals. Crowded offices populated with hundreds of equally sick individual
s merely exacerbates the situation. Some girls develop menstrual problems. Orthopedic distress and chain-smoking are other common symptoms. Many India call center employees find it difficult to have a positive outlook towards life when they can't even get a good night's sleep. Employees deal with an average of one hundred phone calls per shift -- more if their excitable manager is feeling "pumped up" for some reason.
Study these pictures of Indian call centers closely: these are not cuddly, friendly, operator-in-command studios in the traditional sense. Look at the top of every single computer monitor, where nobody has lined up collectable figurines from Pixar's The Incredibles. Where are the Dilbert mugs, the cat calendars, the bowls of candy pushed forth to foster friendship and camaraderie among employees? Okay, very well: where are the Bollywood posters, the curry forks, the belly-dancing platforms? Sometimes there's a banner on the call-center floor: WEAR YOUR BEST SMILE AND MAKE YOUR CUSTOMER SMILE TOO!
The quality of life in India, despite the lack of material comforts and amenities, is rich in religion, family, and human relationships -- none of which matter two shits when you're troubleshooting someone's Photoshop serial number halfway around the world, or helping some fat lady in Alabama figure out why her debit card won't come out of the ATM machine. The moment your shift is over, your chair gets warmed by another representative ("rep") ready to take over where you left off.
The rep's job is complex, to say the least. Chances are he'll be talking to someone as ignorant about India as he or she might be about America.
Customer: How come every time I call Verizon Wireless I get some black dude who can't speak proper English? Would you say you're more from the hood or more from the ghetto?
Employee: Sir. I'm willing to help you conduct this transaction, provided you don't make any further comments like that about my background. Otherwise I'm going to have to end this conversation.
Customer: Faggot. [hangs up]
One of the worst things you can do while trying to navigate a call center is to make a racist remark or a negative comment insulting an Indian rep's ancestry, heritage or skin color. When confronted with such a volatile situation, the rep will have no choice but to flip open the chapter on "setting boundaries for the conversation," and proceed accordingly. His or her voice will drop down to neutral or matter-of-fact tones, showing as little emotional reaction as possible, in the hopes your anger doesn't escalate. The rep's job is to help you subscribe to the Playboy channel, not to make you a better human being.
The reverse racism scenario is equally worthy of study: what does a rep do when the caller believes he or she is a target of racism? Let's watch one of the most offensive (and effective) verbal strategies you as a customer can pull:
Customer: I asked you twice now already: can I get the chamois crib covers in bronzeberry frost and periwinkle or do I have to take my business to Ikea?
Employee: I do believe we have those colors in stock. One "sec" while I check the figures.
Customer: Woah -- did you just call me and my family a bunch of niggers?
In this scenario, the rep will have no choice but to indirectly acknowledge the racist accusation with a neutral observational remark such as it sounds like you're pretty frustrated. Without so much as a pause, the rep will then U-turn the conversation back to the bronzeberry and periwinkle matters at hand. By delivering empathy statements which properly identify your feelings of frustration, and immediately following them up with choices of appeal which a customer can embrace, refuse, or ignore, the Indian rep can avoid further intimidation.
However, responding positively is not always sufficient. The customer can repeat the accusation, even going so far as to suggest everyone in the company is "out to get" a particular race. This is where even experienced reps can choke: these remarks 
must be treated more seriously than other insinuations. If the situation cannot be sufficiently diffused, the customer might bring his case to the media -- who in turn will play endlessly looped recordings of the rep's technique, reflecting poorly upon the whole call center.
In such an event, a company's best public relations maneuver is to fire that rep -- or the entire call center -- in response to a news story that just won't die, thereby exorcising "troublemakers from within" without once examining mitigating circumstances. Companies can be somewhat reluctant to evangelize the number of outsource employees answering phones ten thousand light years away.
It is a multicultural world, and nobody understands each other. A rep's self-control is critical at racist junctures (however unfair or unjustified the accusations) and the same holds true for sexism. Both men and women can be victims of sexist comments, but Indian women are more likely to be targets, particularly when the subject of the call involves computers, mathematics, construction, or machinery. In this example, the customer is a male and the employee is a female.
Customer: Not to be rude, but in my experience women just aren't that knowledgeable about auto repair. I'd be way more comfortable discussing all this with a man.
Employee: I understand. The thing is, if you want your car fixed today, I'm the only person available. So it's up to you what you want to do. I'm happy to discuss the problem with your car so we can get it fixed before the weekend.
Customer: How about I come down there and shave off your tits with a cheese grater?
Again the rep must avoid being "drawn in" to an argument about a woman's natural abilities in the auto shop. While sexist remarks can be insulting and demeaning, it's imperative that the female rep not take the bait. Instead, she must briefly reassure the male customer of her experience and skill and then immediately refocus the conversation back to the customer's car. Unfortunately in this instance, the caller chose to respond with another sexist comment: the implication that a woman without breasts would be an acceptable alternative to a male mechanic. The caller might also have requested some "customer cervix".
Call center employees are trained to understand that a customer's fit of pique surfaces for one of two reasons. The anger can be a byproduct of the company, product or service in question -- or it can arise from personal matters completely unrelated to the rep. One such "unrelated" form of anger involves the caller's past negative experiences with vaguely similar agencies. Callers to a government institution, for instance, may approach the act of speaking to a rep with only disdain, factoring in a lifetime of perceived injustices, exasperation and defeat. 
Customer: It's the fourth building permit I've had trouble with this year! This is the last goddamn time -- I want someone to use his fuckin' brains and tell me which -- which -- goddamn form I'm supposed to fill out, and where I'm supposed to take it or send it. Jesus!
Employee: Well you do seem frustrated and it certainly sounds like you want to get these permits approved as quickly as possible. It's true, that some people can get impatient with the process, and I certainly apologize for any time delays you've experienced. I know you've done much of the planning, and you have all your information ready. Let's get right to it.
Customer: [Gunshot, phone clatters to floor]
Callers become "difficult" when they feel their expectations have not been met, but our fearless Indian rep attempted the most logical course of action: she communicated an awareness of "where the customer is coming from". Hey man, I'm hip to your vibe; this life we endure -- how strange, yet how jolly; etcetera. We're all in it together, kid. This faux familiarity (fauxmiliarity, n.) must be delivered with complete neutrality, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with the caller, and certainly not dwelling on old stuff. Time-traveling is a strategy widely employed by call centers: the rep puts callers in a Wonka-style time machine, transporting them from the past into the present, with promises of four-star customer accommodation in the future.
Anger management is a challenge in any culture. If the callers' connections are free of line noise and their wireless phones are adequately filtering out unwanted background sound, there are only three communication barriers which threaten reps: foreign language customers, callers with impenetrable accents, and customers with speech disabilities.
Customer: [unintelligible]
Employee: I'm sorry, I'm not sure I heard you correctly. Are you calling to apply for a Magic Moments Visa Rewards card?
Customer: Me no rikey. You bad person.
There can be only one common solution to these barriers. The customer service rep must try and try and try again to satisfy the customer's inquiry, under the mindful wiretapping of eavesdropping superiors. The Indian call center rep is a heavily-monitored surgeon performing delicate service operations, and all conversation must be reduced into shorter meta-sentences with periodic summarizations of the discussion so far.
Employee: Okay, you don't like me, and I'm a bad person. Is that correct?
Customer: [unintelligible]
If untreated, anger inevitably leads to abuse. Customers are far more aggressive on the phone than in person. Not surprisingly, the take-this-job-and-please-to-shove-it rate is high in call centers in India, as thirty to forty percent of most workers quit within the first year. They are quickly replaced: English speaking youngsters in India are clamoring for jobs which pay anywhere from $160 to $300 per month.
As India's outsourcing firms continue to grow, those in charge of hiring are starting to despair: the majority of young Indians they interview are 
growing just plain unemployable. Only one in ten graduates appears to be worth placing -- and as one frustrated Mumbai-based manager fumed to Satish Jacobs of ABC News: "Just look at their English!" Several letters in his hands held plaintive requests like, "As I am marrying my daughter, please grant a week's leave," and "I am well in here and I hope you are in the same well." Are you getting any closer to solving the mystery of why these workers only earn one dollar per hour?
If India is unable to recruit workers at reasonable wages, they lose orders to Thailand, China, and the Philippines. Meanwhile, disgruntled Americans and British workers whose jobs have been outsourced can easily get them back -- if they're willing to move to India where their English accents and down-home colloquialisms might be a distinct advantage, and if they're willing to work for an Indian wage. And while you're over there, please do not offer their God a peanut.
Tesla continued research in the field and, later, observed an assistant severely "burnt" by X-rays in his lab. He performed several experiments prior to Roentgen's discovery (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Roentgen) but didn't make his findings widely known; much of his research was lost in the 5th Avenue lab fire of March 1895.
A "world system" for "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon the electrical conductivity was proposed in which transmission in various natural media with current that passes between the two point are used to power devices. In a practical wireless energy transmission system using this principle, a high-power ultraviolet beam might be used to form a vertical ionized channel in the air directly above the transmitter-receiver stations. The same concept is used in virtual lightning rods, the electrolaser electroshock weapon, and has been proposed for disabling vehicles.
Tesla demonstrated "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon electrical conductivity as early as 1891. The Tesla effect (named in honor of Tesla) is the archaic term for an application of this type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor)...
