World Cancer Day: ?Stand Up To Cancer!? and End Mesothelioma ...

Asbestos-caused cancers?continues to claim?thousands?of lives every year in the United States and?asbestos, a known carcinogen, has not been banned. Today is a great day for sharing your feelings and stories with us and throughout your social networks. ?Our radical?collaboration?will fuel efforts to raise awareness to prevent exposure thus eliminating deadly cancers.? As a?melanoma?survivor and?mesothelioma?widow, join me,??Stand Up to Cancer.?

World Cancer Day takes place every year on February 4 and represents an initiative under which the entire world can unite in the fight against the global cancer epidemic.? The day, which is coordinated by the International Union Against Cancer (UICC) with support from the World Health Organization (WHO), aims to help save millions of preventable deaths each year by raising awareness and education about cancer and pressing governments and individuals across the world to take action against the disease.? World Cancer Day 2012 has been themed ?Together Let?s Do Something? because every person, organization, and government individually needs to do their part in order for the world to be able to reduce premature deaths from cancer by 25% by 2025.

Globally, every month 600,000 people die from cancer and many of these deaths could be prevented with increased governmental support and funding for prevention, detection, and treatment programs.? Asbestos, in particular, has been linked to various forms of cancer including lung cancer and mesothelioma.? Some studies have also suggested an association between exposure to asbestos and gastrointestinal and colorectal cancers, as well as an increased risk for throat, kidney, esophagus, and gallbladder cancers.[i] Asbestos has also been shown to cause cancers of the larynx and ovary.[ii] Today, on World Cancer Day, we encourage you to take a stand against asbestos-caused cancers such as mesothelioma by signing the North American Declaration to Eliminate Asbestos-Related Diseases.? Your signature represents the voices of North America?s citizens, as we demand that our government officials cease the mining, exportation, and use of asbestos.

As a?melanoma?survivor and?mesothelioma?widow, join me, ?Stand Up to Cancer.? ?Together, change is possible.

In unity,

Linda Reinstein?s?Social Networks

ADAO Social Networks

[i] ?Asbestos Exposure and Cancer Risk.? National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health. 1 May. 2009. Web. 3 Feb. 2012.? < http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/asbestos>.

Source: http://www.asbestosdiseaseawareness.org/archives/9464

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Newfound Alien Planet is Best Candidate Yet to Support Life, Scientists Say (SPACE.com)

A potentially habitable alien planet ? one that scientists say is the best candidate yet to harbor water, and possibly even life, on its surface ? has been found around a nearby star.

The planet is located in the habitable zone of its host star, which is a narrow circumstellar region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet's surface.

"It's the Holy Grail of exoplanet research to find a planet around a star orbiting at the right distance so it's not too close where it would lose all its water and boil away, and not too far where it would all freeze," Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told SPACE.com. "It's right smack in the habitable zone ? there's no question or discussion about it. It's not on the edge, it's right in there."

Vogt is one of the authors of the new study, which was led by Guillem Anglada-Escud? and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution for Science, a private, nonprofit research organization based in Washington, D.C.

"This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it," Anglada-Escud? said in a statement.

An alien super-Earth

The researchers estimate that the planet, called GJ 667Cc, is at least 4.5 times as massive as Earth, which makes it a so-called super-Earth. It takes roughly 28 days to make one orbital lap around its parent star, which is located a mere 22 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Scorpius (the Scorpion).

"This is basically our next-door neighbor," Vogt said. "It's very nearby. There are only about 100 stars closer to us than this one."

Interestingly enough, the host star, GJ 667C, is a member of a triple-star system. GJ 667C is an M-class dwarf star that is about a third of the mass of the sun, and while it is faint, it can be seen by ground-based telescopes, Vogt said. [Gallery: The Strangest Alien Planets]

"The planet is around one star in a triple-star system," Vogt explained. "The other stars are pretty far away, but they would look pretty nice in the sky."

The discovery of a planet around GJ 667C came as a surprise to the astronomers, because the entire star system has a different chemical makeup than our sun. The system has much lower abundances of heavy elements (elements heavier than hydrogen and helium), such as iron, carbon and silicon.

"It's pretty deficient in metals," Vogt said. "These are the materials out of which planets form ? the grains of stuff that coalesce to eventually make up planets ? so we shouldn't have really expected this star to be a likely case for harboring planets."

The fortuitous discovery could mean that?potentially habitable alien worlds ?could exist in a greater variety of environments than was previously thought possible, the researchers said.

"Statistics tell us we shouldn't have found something this quickly this soon unless there's a lot of them out there," Vogt said. "This tells us there must be an awful lot of these planets out there. It was almost too easy to find, and it happened too quickly."

The detailed findings of the study will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

An intriguing star system

Another super-Earth that orbits much closer to GJ 667C was previously detected in 2010, but the finding was never published, Vogt added. This planet, called GJ 667Cb, takes 7.2 days to circle the star but its location makes it far too hot to sustain liquid water on its surface.

"It's basically glowing cinders, or a well-lit charcoal," Vogt said. "We know about a lot of these, but they're thousands of degrees and not places where you could live."

But, the newly detected GJ 667Cc planet is a much more intriguing candidate, he said.

"When a planet gets bigger than about 10 times the size of the Earth, there's a runaway process that happens, where it begins to eat up all the gas and ice in the disk that it's forming out of and swells quickly into something like Uranus, Jupiter or Saturn," Vogt explained. "When you have a surface and the right temperature, if there's water around, there's a good chance that it could be in liquid form. This planet is right in that sweet spot in the habitable zone, so we've got the right temperature and the right mass range."

Preliminary observations also suggest that more planets could exist in this system, including a gas giant planet and another super-Earth that takes about 75 days to circle the star. More research will be needed to confirm these planetary candidates, as well as to glean additional details about the potentially habitable super-Earth, the scientists said.

Finding nearby alien planets

To make their discovery, the researchers used public data from the European Southern Observatory combined with observations from the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the new Carnegie Planet Finder Spectrograph at the Magellan II Telescope in Chile.

Follow-up analyses were also made using a planet-hunting technique that measures the small dips, or wobbles, in a star's motion caused by the gravitational tug of a planet.

"With the advent of a new generation of instruments, researchers will be able to survey many M dwarf stars for similar planets and eventually look for spectroscopic signatures of life in one of these worlds," Anglada-Escud? said in a statement. Anglada-Escud? was with the Carnegie Institution for Science when he conducted the research, but has since moved on to the University of Gottingen in Germany.

With the GJ 667C system being relatively nearby, it also opens exciting possibilities for probing potentially habitable alien worlds in the future, Vogt said, which can't easily be done with the planets that are being found by NASA's prolific Kepler spacecraft.

"The planets coming out of Kepler are typically thousands of light-years away and we could never send a space probe out there," Vogt said. "We've been explicitly focusing on very nearby stars, because with today's technology, we could send a robotic probe out there, and within a few hundred years, it could be sending back picture postcards."

You can follow SPACE.com staff writer Denise Chow on Twitter @denisechow. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/science/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/space/20120202/sc_space/newfoundalienplanetisbestcandidateyettosupportlifescientistssay

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Romney: Panetta's Withdrawal Announcement 'Misguided' (ABC News)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories News, RSS and RSS Feed via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/194557773?client_source=feed&format=rss

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Writing Well (2)

Dr Vincent Kan

2012-01-31

In the previous article, I touched on how writing can provide a unique opportunity to train children?s creative, reflective and persuasive thoughts; and why developing their implicit writing skills is as important as developing their explicit ones.? The first implicit skill I illustrated was the construction of a message for every piece of writing.

In this article, I shall discuss the second skill ? structuring.? At this point, it is only natural to ask just how many different skills there are in all.? I usually breakdown a piece of writing into four parts: message, structure, content and presentation.? Of the four, only the first two are implicit; and of the remaining two, content is mostly reading related (as children get older, we teach them research skills along similar lines) while presentation is mostly language and style related.

Structuring might be a big word for young children, but essentially all it means is to develop a way to organise a series (i.e. more than one) of content in the most effective way.? Effective, in most cases, should mean easy to understand.? In storytelling, though, it could mean building in suspense, intrigue, even mislead where necessary.

I make structuring a very high priority in my teaching for two reasons ? it lifts up the strong learners and protects the weaker ones.

For most children learning English as a second language, utility is their primary goal.? They would like to be able to use the language well in their studies, and later on in their work.? A few might harbour the ambition of making a career out of the language, be it through teaching, creative writing, journalism or other avenues ? and the internet age has certainly made this far more possible than before.? For most, however, they need English to facilitate what they do: study, participate in school and social activities, conduct meetings or formal communications, make presentations?etc.? For these purposes, being able to write in a structural way makes their writing much easier to read which in turn better-fulfils their intent.

What is a good structure?? Interestingly, there is no one structure for all ? it depends on the message, which is why the importance of a good message precedes that of a good structure.? For the sake of illustration, I will use the kind of messages that children often come up with to demonstrate how we can help them plan a structure.

The writing, say, is a character piece.? For younger children, it might be a fireman or an astronaut; for older children, it might be Helen of Troy or James Bond.? Regardless, it has to begin with a message.? Let?s say that after some creative deliberations, it was decided that the message would be ?James Bond can never lose!?? It might appear common and simplistic, but unlike a title ? when a child could come up with anything without further considerations ? this is now a message i.e. what follows has to deliver that very message.

How would structure help?? Just like the construction of a message, it begins with a series of ?how about? and ?what if?.? A message like the invincibility of a super hero could be constructed in many different ways.? It could begin with a series of examples, then an argument; it could begin with a question, and then answered via a series of examples; it could begin with a series of different views, then examples, then arguments?etc.? Rather than suggesting any particular structure, I encourage children to verbally or mentally walk through some of them, and decide for themselves which is more convincing or coherent for the purpose of their particular message.

At first, it will seem bothersome to go through this exercise because a lot of effort is required before any actual writing is done, and this will require patience from the children.? Equally though, it will expose them to the reality of writing ? works that eventually become creative, reflective or persuasive are always the product of careful and thoughtful planning prior.? It is almost impossible to write well without some measure of patience, and given the importance of patience as a life skill, acquiring it through learning to write well should be seen as a double benefit.

Having a good structure for a piece will make it much easier and pleasurable to read, one could even say that having a neat structure is a style in itself.? For children whose basic language skills is adequate or good, learning to plan their writing structurally helps them think comprehensively about what they are trying to write and it helps them think analytically about how to write it, both processes are greatly beneficial.

What about children who are lacking in some basic language area, say, those who are still struggling with tenses?

I made a distinction between implicit and explicit learning in Writing Well (1).? For children who need to fill gaps in certain language areas, they will have to make those fillings via explicit learning.? Outside of schools, there are also direct ways such as language books and language exercises (the internet provides plenty of options) and there are indirect ways such as read-write drills.? The former is more traditional (some would say mundane) but requires less supervision along the way, the later is more interactive but will require more guidance throughout.? It should be made clear, however, that the benefits of structuring are apparent even when a child is in the process of gap-filling.? In fact, the weaker children who are used to being told that their writing is incomprehensible will often be surprised by the improvement delivered through an improved writing structure alone ? which should in turn motivate them try harder and learn better.

It must be very apparent by now that thinking well underpins all aspects of language learning, no matter reading, speaking or writing.? Amongst the three, writing is unique in that it provides a dedicated space for children to learn how to be creative, reflective or persuasive without the pressure of time.? Learning to write well through a thoughtful message and a purposeful structure helps those with good abilities to write even better while making the writing of early or weaker learners far more comprehensible.

This sums up the basic aspects of reading, speaking and writing well through thinking and learning well.? In the upcoming articles, I will begin to focus on specific aspects of language learning, such as reading for meaning or writing a persuasive argument.

Source: http://wiseland.edu.hk/?p=648

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Linked CEO Jeff Weiner Says IPO ?Didn?t Really Change Anything?

LinkedIn's Jeff Weiner won this year's Best CEO award at the Crunchies, and backstage he talked about LinkedIn's big milestone from the past year ? its IPO. "The event itself was memorable, but for us it was really just a stepping stone," Weiner said. It's a common theme from Weiner's interviews before the IPO, when he would dodge questions about the timing and emphasize that it was just another step in the company's growth. This time, Weiner added that he's proudest of the fact that "for us, it didn't really change anything.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/n7n0K5d5ajo/

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The steps to making It through Airport Security ... - Travel articles

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Tourists banned from U.S. over Twitter jokes?

By Rosa Golijan

Almost everyone realizes that saying certain words?? such as "bomb" or "explosion"?? in an airport can lead to awkward conversations with security inspectors at this point. By now is it not commonly understood that cracking similar jokes on publicly viewable social networks?could potentially have similar results?

According to the Sun and the Daily Mail?? daily tabloids published in the United Kingdom?? a handful of ominous-sounding Twitter jokes got 26-year-old Leigh Van Bryan and 24-year-old Emily Bunting kicked out of the United States before they could even begin their long-awaited vacation.?

When msnbc.com contacted a?U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson, we received confirmation that, though unidentified, a couple matching these circumstances was in fact declared "inadmissible," and "returned to their country of residence."?

Before the two British tourists flew into?Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) last week,?Leigh posted several Twitter messages about their trip, reports the Sun. In one tweet, addressed to a fellow Twitter user who goes by "@MelissaxWalton," he wrote "free this week for a quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?"

In another Twitter post he announced "3 weeks today, we're totally in LA p****** people off on Hollywood Blvd and diggin' Marilyn Monroe up!" He tagged a Twitter user named "@ELB_1987" in that message.

According to the Daily Mail, it was because of those tweets that the?Department of Homeland Security (DHS) flagged Bryan and Bunting as "a potential threat."?Upon arriving at LAX, the two pals were "detained by armed guards," explains the publication:

Despite telling officials the term 'destroy' was British slang for 'party', they were held on suspicion of planning to 'commit crimes' and had their passports confiscated. ...?Federal agents even searched [Bryan's] suitcase looking for spades and shovels, claiming [Bunting] was planning to act as [Bryan's] 'look out' while he raided Marilyn's tomb.

The two were quizzed for five hours before being "put in a van with illegal immigrants and locked up overnight," writes the Sun.?They were then kept in separate holding cells for 12 hours before being put on a flight home.

When we reached out to the appropriate authorities for more information about this incident, a?U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)?spokesperson confirmed that two individuals were in fact denied admission to the U.S. under vaguely similar circumstances:

Based on information provided by the LAX Port Authority Infoline ??a suspicious activity tipline ??CBP conducted a secondary interview of two subjects presenting for entry into the United States. Information gathered during this interview revealed that both individuals were inadmissible to the United States and were returned to their country of residence.

When I questioned whether tweets posted by either individual had anything to do with the incident, I was told that the details of the detainment/expulsion were protected by privacy laws. The same reply came when I inquired whether the individuals were temporarily or permanently barred from entering the U.S.

The CBP spokes person did explain that the agency "denies entry to thousands of individuals each year on grounds of inadmissibility, some of which include: improper travel documents, prohibited activities or intent, traveling under the Visa Waiver Program without qualifying for participation in that program, smuggling of contraband or prohibited goods, criminal activity or history, immigration violations such as prior overstay, attempting to gain entry with fraudulent documents or posing as an imposter, and national security concerns, among others."

Related stories:

Want more tech news, silly puns, or amusing links? You'll get plenty of all three if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on?Twitter, subscribing to her?Facebook?posts, or circling her?on?Google+.?

If you're more interested in?Sam Spratt???the guy who made the cute Twitter bird illustration above ? then you'll want these?Facebook,?Twitter?and?Tumblr?links instead.

Source: http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/30/10272373-tourists-banned-from-us-over-twitter-jokes

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