'Miracle Garden' is Dubai's latest over-the-top attraction

dubai

A. Pawlowski TODAY contributor

3 hours ago

Courtesy Dubai Miracle Garden

It took 60 days and 400 people to create the the Dubai Miracle Garden, which contains 45 million flowers.

No, it?s not a mirage. An impossibly huge and colorful garden is blooming in the desert climate of Dubai, aiming to set world records and lure visitors with sensory delights.

The region?s newest tourist attraction ? dubbed the Dubai Miracle Garden -- contains 45 million flowers arranged into mosaics, patterns and shapes. Organizers hope it will stand out in a metropolis that already dazzles travelers with its glitzy architecture, man-made islands and the world?s tallest building.

After all, this is the place where you can frolic in the snow in the first indoor ski resort in the Middle East, but the garden?s creator is betting that visitors are yearning to spend time outside.

?People get tired of malls, closed places,? said Abdel Nasser Y. Rahhal, general manager of Akar Landscaping Services and Agriculture.

?I hope people will understand that this country is not only for extremes in concrete and steel. This country is given beautiful weather for seven months? with a little care, you can get a really beautiful production.?

Courtesy Dubai Miracle Garden

The park features about 30 different varieties of blooms, including petunias, geraniums and marigolds.

So how do you get flowers to thrive in a region known for its dry, hot weather?

The blooming season in Dubai lasts from mid-October to mid-May, Rahhal told NBC News. Right now, daytime temperatures reach 70-80 degrees Fahrenheit and dip to around 50 degrees at night, so flowers don?t need much watering and the water that is provided doesn?t evaporate, he added.

At the same time, the garden has installed what it calls an eco-friendly irrigation system and uses water retention materials, like capillary mats and polymers, to deliver moisture most efficiently.

It took 60 days and 400 people to create the 721,000 square foot garden, which opened on Valentine?s Day. Rahhal estimated the cost of the project at around $11 million.

The park features about 30 different varieties of blooms, including petunias, geraniums and marigolds. Visitors strolling among the flower-covered arches, pyramids, and sculptures have been impressed.

?I was stunned,? said Anne Abit, an expat from the Philippines who lives in Dubai and blogged about her visit to the garden. But she noted it wasn?t as peaceful as she had hoped, with caretakers carefully watching visitors and blowing their whistles at anyone who was in danger of touching a petal. However, the garden is so breathtaking that "it's totally understandable why the guards are so protective with the flowers," she told NBC News.

Another drawback, said Abit, is the location's relative inacessability. There's no direct public transit and the Miracle Garden is so new that she said she had to show taxi drivers the spot on the map to get there.

Courtesy Dubai Miracle Garden

The garden features whimsical designs, as well as flower-covered arches, pyramids and sculptures.

The park will close for four months out of the year during the hottest period -- a break that will give organizers the chance to redesign it for the next season, with different flowers and shapes, Rahhal said.

?If you come next year, you will never know you were in the same garden,? he added.

The second phase of the project is set to begin this summer, with the addition of a butterfly garden, retail space and an ?edible plants dome? that will allow people to pick their own fruit.

Dubai Miracle Garden also hopes to be recognized by Guiness World Records as having the world?s biggest flower clock, the longest wall of flowers and the largest pyramid of flowers.

Admission to the park is about $5.50 for adults. Kids under 3 get in for free.

The Dubai Properties Group, a partner in the project, expects the park to draw more than one million visitors over the next year.

Source: http://www.today.com/travel/giant-miracle-garden-dubais-latest-over-top-attraction-1C8616900

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Chad's president: Al-Qaida chief killed in Mali

FILE - This image taken from video and provided by U.S.-based SITE Intelligence Group Thursday Sept. 30, 2010 shows a foreign hostage who was among seven seized in Niger by an al-Qaida offshoot, according to a group that monitors terrorism. In October 2010 French media reported that an earlier hostage of the group had identified the captor at left in the image as Abu Zeid, a senior leader of Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. Chadian authorities on Friday March 1 2013 announced their forces had killed Abu Zeid in fighting in northern Mali. (AP Photo/SITE)

FILE - This image taken from video and provided by U.S.-based SITE Intelligence Group Thursday Sept. 30, 2010 shows a foreign hostage who was among seven seized in Niger by an al-Qaida offshoot, according to a group that monitors terrorism. In October 2010 French media reported that an earlier hostage of the group had identified the captor at left in the image as Abu Zeid, a senior leader of Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. Chadian authorities on Friday March 1 2013 announced their forces had killed Abu Zeid in fighting in northern Mali. (AP Photo/SITE)

FILE - This picture provided by the French Army Communications Audiovisual office (ECPAD) and released Monday Jan. 28, 2013 shows Chadian soldiers securing Gao airport, north of Mali, Saturday, Jan. 26, 2013. A presidential spokesman says that Chadian President Idriss Deby announced Friday March 1 2013 that Chadian troops fighting to dislodge an al-Qaida affiliate in northern Mali killed one of the group's leading commanders, Abou Zeid. He is a leader of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb and was behind the kidnapping of several Westerners. (AP Photo/Ghislain Mariette, EMA-ECPAD, file)

N'DJAMENA, Chad (AP) ? Chadian President Idriss Deby announced Friday that Chadian troops fighting to dislodge an al-Qaida affiliate in northern Mali killed one of the group's leading commanders, Abou Zeid.

The death of the Algerian warlord, a feared radical leader of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb behind the kidnapping of several Westerners, could not immediately be verified. His death would be a big blow to his group and its growing influence in North and West Africa.

Officials in Mali and in France, which is leading an international military intervention in Mali against Islamic extremists linked to AQIM, could not confirm the death. The White House had no immediate reaction to the announcement. The U.S. has offered drones and intelligence help to the French-led operation.

The Chadian president's spokesman said that Deby announced the death of Abou Zeid during a ceremony Friday for Chadian soldiers killed in fighting in Mali.

Deby said, "It was our soldiers who killed two big Islamist chiefs in northern Mali," including Abou Zeid, according to the spokesman.

The spokesman insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak ahead of an announcement on state television on the matter. It was unclear when it was expected, and the spokesman gave no further details.

Chadian television showed images of Friday's tribute to the fallen soldiers from Chad, a row of coffins draped with the blue, yellow and red flags, and dignitaries from Chad and neighboring countries.

Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, who led one of the most violent brigades of al-Qaida's North African franchise and helped lead the extremist takeover of northern Mali, was thought to be 47 years old.

He was a pillar of the southern realm of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, responsible for the death of at least two European hostages. He was believed to be holding four French nationals kidnapped two years ago at a uranium mine in Niger. The fate of those hostages, working for French company Areva, was unclear Friday night.

Abou Zeid held a Frenchman released in February 2010, and another who was executed that July. He's also been linked to the execution of a British hostage in 2009.

The French military moved into Mali on Jan. 11 to push back militants linked to Abou Zeid and other extremist groups who had imposed harsh Islamic rule in the vast country and who were seen as an international terrorist threat. The extremists took control over northern Mali in a power vacuum after a coup last year, and had started moving toward the capital.

France is trying to rally other African troops to help in the military campaign, since Mali's military is weak and poor. Chadian troops have offered the most robust reinforcement.

For the past 10 days, French military, along with Chadian forces, have been locked in a weeklong battle against extremists in the Adrar des Ifoghas mountains of northern Mali that has left scores dead.

A French presidential aide said the French government would not comment on the Chadian president's announcement. Earlier, French President Francois Hollande said: "Information is circulating. It is not for me to confirm this, because we need to follow through the operation to the end."

Earlier reports had said Abou Zeid was killed by French forces, which would be a victory for France. But French officials have been very cautious about the claims of his death, especially because of the number of hostages believed scattered around the same region where the fighting is under way.

French military spokesman Col. Thierry Burkhard said Friday night that French and Chadian soldiers are working together in a general sense but they are not always "side by side" in every operation. So he could not say whether French soldiers were involved in the operation that Deby says killed Abou Zeid.

Abou Zeid was a powerful and shadowy figure, and mystery surrounds even his real name. Along with his nom de guerre, Abou Zeid had an alias, Mosab Abdelouadoud, and nicknames, the emir of the south and the little emir, due to his diminutive size. But the Algerian press has raised questions about his legal identity ? Abid Hamadou or Mohamed Ghedir.

He was viewed as a disciplined radical with close ties to the overall AQIM boss, Abdelmalek Droukdel, who oversees operations from his post in northern Algeria.

Abou Zeid fought with a succession of Islamist insurgency movements trying to topple the Algerian state since 1992. He reportedly joined the brutal, and now defunct, Armed Islamic Group that massacred whole villages in northern Algeria, then joined the Salafist Group for Call and Combat that morphed into al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in 2006.

An Algerian court tried him in absentia in January 2012, convicting him of belonging to an international terrorist group and sentencing him to life in prison.

Abou Zeid was an arch rival of Moktar Belmoktar, known as "the one-eyed sheik" after he lost an eye in combat in Afghanistan. Belmoktar's profile soared after a mid-January attack on a huge Algerian gas plant and a mass hostage-taking which left 37 hostages and 29 attackers dead.

The two of them spent years building up the AQIM presence in Mali, but it was Abou Zeid who was considered the crueler of the two. After the militants took over Mali's north, Abou Zeid took control of the fabled city of Timbuktu, meting out justice according to his extremist view of Islamic law.

Pounding by French forces in January quickly pushed Islamists out of major cities, including Timbuktu, and to the rocky desert in the northeast.

______

Charlton reported from Paris. Associated Press writers Elaine Ganley and Sylvie Corbet in Paris and Rukmini Callimachi in Dakar, Senegal, contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-03-01-Mali-Al-Qaida/id-8817e655bff440cca8a07bf290f6a279

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How to Develop a Multilingual Content Marketing Strategy | Search ...

As online users become more savvy and increasingly reject direct and invasive advertising techniques, content marketing is becoming ever more important. It?s a key way to engage customers and spread brand awareness.

Creating content that is both relevant and valuable to its target audience is at the very heart of effective content marketing. This can be challenging enough in a single language, but if you?re dealing with multiple languages and cultural differences, there are even more issues to consider.

It?s certainly not as simple as throwing your content through an automatic translation program and hoping your message still gets across. There can be a lot more work involved, but it?s undoubtedly worth the effort.

English remains the single most commonly used language online but it still represents only around a quarter of total usage and other languages are rising at far faster rates. Where English Internet usage grew by 301 percent between 2000 and 2011, Arabic increased by a huge 2,501 percent. Sharp rises in Chinese, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese (the last two largely reflecting growth in Latin America) also help illustrate increasing penetration rates in emerging markets.

Already more than half of companies in the Fortune 500 maintain multilingual websites, with 70 percent of the top 20 boasting some degree of localized content. Company websites provide an essential window and are often a customer?s first port of call, but blogs and social media profiles can also be ideal platforms for multilingual content marketing.

Do Your Research

It should almost go without saying that thorough market research is essential before taking your brand to foreign markets. There?s little point in undertaking any kind of marketing campaign if you are not selling in a particular region or country. There?s also little point attempting to sell in the first place if your product is unlikely to have that cross-cultural appeal.

Once you are committed, you will need to ask some basic questions about the market. These can involve languages spoken (for example, Belgium has three official languages, plus a number of unofficial languages or dialects), consumer habits and cultural expectations.

Identify Your Core Message

It?s important for any brand to have a strong core message. Harley Davidson do not just sell motorcycles; they also offer a lifestyle. Visa built campaigns (remember ?Visa Is Everywhere You Want It To Be??) around the fact that their cards can be used pretty much everywhere.

Unless you have an utterly unique product (and if you have a successful one, there will doubtless be imitators close behind), you will find you will find yourself competing with other businesses offering similar products and services. What do you offer that?s different or what do you excel in? How do you want people to connect to you? Identify your core message and tailor the details of exactly how you deliver it to suit individual markets.?

Simplify Content Management

Content management systems such as Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress can help take some of the hassle out of adapting your content. They all support multiple languages with features to streamline the process.

Other tools such as translation memories, terminology databases, and corporate glossaries can also be useful. Translation memories store previous translations across given language pairings and can be used to search and retrieve phrases and content that has already been translated. This can help save on both time and translation costs and ensure you maintain a sense of cohesion throughout your translated content.

Furthermore, this can be particularly important if you are using a variety of platforms such as websites, blogs, press releases, and social media sites. Terminology databases and corporate glossaries can be similarly useful and are used to ensure you maintain a uniform approach to technical and corporate terms.

Translate and Adapt Content

With your core message and content management systems in place it?s time to adapt your content. Translation is only one part of this, albeit a vital one. You should certainly never rely on automatic translation as this can be prone to contextual errors, and may not deal well with colloquialisms, slang, abbreviations, and other linguistic variations.

Working with native translators certainly helps, but they should also preferably have experience in creating the type of content you need. Messages should be adapted as well as translated to take into account cultural preferences and tone. This can also involve localizing content with specific cultural references, whether these are references to places, current affairs, celebrities, TV shows, or culturally relevant jokes.

Even the biggest global brands can find multilingual content marketing a challenge. But as the World Wide Web becomes ever more diverse, it offers an important way to reach across cultural and linguistic divides.

Image Credit: Shutterstock / ALMAGAMI

About The Author: Christian Arno is the founder of Lingo24, a leading translation company in US. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 170 employees spanning three continents and clients in over sixty countries. In the past twelve months, they have translated over forty million words for businesses in every industry sector, including the likes of MTV, World Bank and American Express. Follow Lingo24 on Twitter: @Lingo24.

Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-develop-a-multilingual-content-marketing-strategy/59749/

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SpaceX rocket poised for flight to space station

This Jan. 12, 2013 photo provided by NASA shows the Dragon spacecraft inside a processing hangar at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla. where teams had just installed the spacecraft's solar array fairings. The California company known as SpaceX is scheduled to launch its unmanned Falcon rocket on Friday morning, March 1, 2013, carrying a Dragon capsule containing more than a ton of food, tools, computer hardware and science experiments. (AP Photo/NASA, Kim Shiflett)

This Jan. 12, 2013 photo provided by NASA shows the Dragon spacecraft inside a processing hangar at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla. where teams had just installed the spacecraft's solar array fairings. The California company known as SpaceX is scheduled to launch its unmanned Falcon rocket on Friday morning, March 1, 2013, carrying a Dragon capsule containing more than a ton of food, tools, computer hardware and science experiments. (AP Photo/NASA, Kim Shiflett)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) ? A private rocket is poised to blast off Friday on a supply run to the International Space Station.

The unmanned Falcon rocket is owned by the SpaceX company. The Dragon capsule on board is filled with more than a ton of space station supplies and experiments.

Good weather is forecast for the 10:10 a.m. liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Fla. It's a one-second launch window.

NASA is paying SpaceX to deliver cargo to the space station, and bring back science samples and other goods. This will be the company's third delivery mission.

There's no ice cream this time for the six space station astronauts. The freezers are full. But SpaceX included fruit straight from the orchard.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk hopes to fly people aboard a modified Dragon capsule by 2015.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/b2f0ca3a594644ee9e50a8ec4ce2d6de/Article_2013-03-01-US-SCI-Private-Space/id-91ff63fc39da4ebe8757c28736a150e8

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Mineral diversity clue to early Earth chemistry

Friday, March 1, 2013

Mineral evolution is a new way to look at our planet's history. It's the study of the increasing diversity and characteristics of Earth's near-surface minerals, from the dozen that arrived on interstellar dust particles when the Solar System was formed to the more than 4,700 types existing today. New research on a mineral called molybdenite by a team led by Robert Hazen at Carnegie's Geophysical Laboratory provides important new insights about the changing chemistry of our planet as a result of geological and biological processes.

The work is published by Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Mineral evolution is an approach to understanding Earth's changing near-surface geochemistry. All chemical elements were present from the start of our Solar System, but at first they formed comparatively few minerals?perhaps no more than 500 different species in the first billion years. As time passed on the planet, novel combinations of elements led to new minerals.

Molybdenite is the most common ore mineral of the critical metallic element molybdenum. Hazen and his team, which includes fellow Geophysical Laboratory scientists Dimitri Sverjensky and John Armstrong, analyzed 442 molybdenite samples from 135 locations and ages ranging from 2.91 billion years old to 6.3 million years old. They specifically looked for trace contamination of the element rhenium in the molybdenite, because rhenium can be used to use to gauge historical chemical reactions with oxygen from the environment.

They found that concentrations of rhenium, a trace element that is sensitive to oxidation reactions, increased significantly?by a factor of eight?over the past three billion years. The team suggests that this change reflects the increasing near-surface oxidation conditions from the Archean Eon more than 2.5 billion years ago to the Phanerozoic Eon less than 542 million years ago. This oxygen increase was a consequence of what's called the Great Oxidation Event, when the Earth's atmospheric oxygen levels skyrocketed as a consequence of oxygen-producing photosynthetic microbes.

In addition, they found that the distribution of molybdenite deposits through time roughly correlates with five periods of supercontinent formation, the assemblies of Kenorland, Nuna, Rodinia, Pannotia, and Pangea. This correlation supports previous findings from Hazen and his colleagues that mineral formation increases markedly during episodes of continental convergence and supercontinent assembly and that a dearth of mineral deposits form during periods of tectonic stability.

"Our work continues to demonstrate that a major driving force for mineral evolution is hydrothermal activity associated with colliding continents and the increasing oxygen content of the atmosphere caused by the rise of life on Earth," Hazen said.

###

Carnegie Institution: http://www.ciw.edu

Thanks to Carnegie Institution for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127090/Mineral_diversity_clue_to_early_Earth_chemistry

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Suspect in Las Vegas Strip killings arrested in Los Angeles

By Jason Kandel and Nyree Arabian, NBCLosAngeles.com

The suspect in last week's triple slaying on the Las Vegas Strip has been arrested in Los Angeles, the Clark County District Attorney's Office said on Thursday.

Ammar Harris, 26, was taken into custody in LA in connection with the shooting death of Oakland rapper Kenneth Wayne Cherry Jr. aka Kenny Clutch, officials said.

Details about his arrest were not immediately available. KSNV, NBC's affiliate in Las Vegas, reported that the suspect was hiding out in LA at a friend's home that a task force of officers had been watching.

Las Vegas police expect to have more information about the arrest at an afternoon press conference.

Police accuse the suspect of being the driver of a Range Rover from which gunfire erupted, killing the 27-year-old rapper.

Clutch died at the wheel of a Maserati.

The Maserati crashed into a taxicab which subsequently exploded, killing the driver and the 48-year old passenger.

Harris was identified by police as the lead suspect in the case.

Harris could be seen online boasting about the stacks of money that have come his way thanks to being a pimp, according to reports.

In one video, Harris "flashes a thick stack" of $100 bills.

In a Web posting, he boasts of the flock of women at his home, all of whom are working for him.

In another, he talks about the birthday party he is organizing on a boat in the Atlantic Ocean, replete with a $1,000 bikini contest, the AP reported.

Source: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/28/17135825-suspect-in-las-vegas-strip-killings-arrested-in-los-angeles?lite

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The HR I.Q. Test: March '13 ? Business Management Daily: Free ...

1. If a company _____________, 56% of young workers (age 18-30) say they would either not accept a job or would ignore the policy.

?? a. Banned the access of social media at work

?? b. Required hourly email check-ins during waking hours

?? c. Banned romantic relationships among staff

2. Which landmark employment law turned 20 years old last month?

?? a. Age Discrimination in Employment Act

?? b. Family and Medical Leave Act

?? c. Americans with Disabilities Act

3. In this law?s first year, federal ??investi?gators cited 36 companies for violation of the law that requires employers to:?

?? a. Give employees time and space to express breast milk

?? b. Let employees take leave for their children?s school events

?? c. Keep photographs on file of every new hire

4. About 36% of public workers belong to a union. What percentage of private-sector employees were members of a union in 2012?

?? a. 23.4%????

?? b. 11.3%????

?? c. 6.6%

5. OSHA requires many employers to post what information in their workplaces from Feb. 1 to April 30 each year?

?? a. List of identifiable hazards in the workplace

?? b. Summary of injuries and illnesses from the previous year

?? c. List of top 10 ?least healthy? employees on the payroll

6. What percentage of U.S. employees say they ?often? or ?sometimes? feel underutilized in their jobs?

?? a. 47%????

?? b. 63%????

?? c. 86%

____________________________________________________________________________________

Sources: 1. Cisco survey; 2. U.S. Department of Labor; 3. U.S. Department of Labor; 4. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; 5. OSHA; 6. Lee Hecht Harrison survey.

Answers:? 1.? a??2.? b??3.? a??4.? c??5.? b??6.? c

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