File photo of Tony Abbott at flag raising and citizenship ceremony, January 2015. Image: Nick-D.
Yesterday, Australia’s Prime Minister proposed his government might strip individuals of their Australian citizenship if authorities consider them involved in terrorist activity.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott stated, “As flagged by me in my national security statement in February, we will be legislating within a few weeks to strip dual citizens involved in terrorism of their Australian citizenship”.
The Coalition government’s bill aims to empower the immigration minister to revoke Australian citizenship of dual nationals suspected of involvement in terrorist activity.
Speaking of procedural for stripping individual citizenship, immigration minister Peter Dutton said he would take advice from intelligence agencies, such as the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.
Dutton said, “We would gather as much evidence as was possible and we would make a decision whether or not we thought somebody was captured by what is a tight definition in relation to somebody committing an act of terrorism, an act preparatory to, fundraising or supporting a terrorist organisation or providing financial support or indoctrinating young people into the ways of one of these cults.”
This news comes as the Australian wife of Islamic State fighter Khaled Sharrouf, Tara Nettleton, attempts to re-enter the country with her children. Khaled’s seven-year-old son appeared in an internet image Khaled posted last year — in which the boy was holding a severed human head.
Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs announced on Wednesday that iPhone technology is not being used to monitor the location of its customers. The scandal arose from concern that data collected by Apple would make it possible for anyone with access to a person’s private computer to retrieve information about their movements.
Jobs acknowledged that while iPhones keep a database of Wi-Fi and cell tower hotspots these do not reveal anything about individual users’ location. “That’s what people saw on the phone and mistook it for location”
In a separate statement, Apple clarified the device is merely caching data in order to improve the speed of locating users in the future.
Jobs confirmed during the interview that Apple would testify before the United States Congress. “They have asked us to come and we will honour their request, of course.”
Apple have since made plans to release software updates that will cut the size of the wireless hotspot location database stored on its iPhones.
The data scandal, coined ‘Location-gate’ has overshadowed news of Apple’s announcement for sales of the delayed white iPhone 4 which will begin shipping from Thursday.
With a state by-election coming up in Victoria, Australia, many minor parties and independent candidates will be looking to gain a seat in the Legislative Assembly. Liz Mumby is one of the independents.
“I am a medical sales professional, a wife and mother and a small business owner,” says Mumby, the Division of Altona. “I don’t come from a political background, I live in the real world.” She argues that “we should not limit the debate to public transport issues just because the retiring member was the Minister for Public Transport.”
Wikinews reporter Patrick Gillett held an exclusive email interview with Mrs. Mumby.
This exclusive interview features first-hand journalism by a Wikinews reporter. See the collaboration page for more details.
Friday, November 3, 2006
On November 13, Torontonians will be heading to the polls to vote for their ward’s councillor and for mayor. Among Toronto’s ridings is Scarborough-Agincourt (Ward 39). Two candidates responded to Wikinews’ requests for an interview. This ward’s candidates include Wayne Cook, Mike Del Grande (incumbent), Samuel Kung, Lushan Lu, Sunshine Smith, and John Wong.
Earlier this month, Wikinews spoke with University of Sussex professor of economics L. Alan Winters regarding the decision of the United Kingdom to leave the European Union (EU) in the 2016 Brexit referendum and the subsequent negotiations leading up to and following the EU–UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement of December, which he has researched extensively. In a call, a Wikinews correspondent spoke with Professor Winters about recent developments in UK trade policy to learn more about his observations.
Winters is professor of economics at the University of Sussex, as well as founding director and fellow of the UK Trade Policy Observatory (UKTPO). His career spans over 15 years, including as chief economist at the Department for International Development, director of the Development Research Group of the World Bank, CEO of the Migrating Out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium and advisor for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Commonwealth Secretariat, the European Commission, the European Parliament, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the World Trade Organization and the Inter-American Development Bank.
Three reports where Winters is listed as an author were used as reference during the interview: “COVID-19 will reinforce the Brexit shock”, “The Costs of Brexit” and “Taking stock of the new UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement: governance, state subsidies and the level playing field”.
Winters was awarded the title “Companion of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath”, styled C.B., on June 16, 2012 as part of the 2012 Birthday Honours.
The Olympic Flag outside the Vancouver City Hall. This particular flag was replaced with a replica after it was stolen.
Three anti-Olympic games protesters, posed as a flower delivery service, quickly ransacked British Columbia, Canada premier Gordon Campbell‘s downtown Vancouver, British Columbia office yesterday afternoon, breaking windows and throwing pictures, office documents, and various other items.
After the suspects were caught, they said that they were upset over Campbell’s support for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, British Columbia. They also claimed to work for “The Anti-Poverty Committee”.
They are now facing charges for property damage and uttering threats during or after the incident. Police are only identifying them as a 23-year-old man, a 29-year-old man, and a 17-year old female. The 23-year-old faces a third charge of assault by trespassing.
“The Anti-Poverty Committee”, which claims to help the homeless and poor in the city, are opposed to the 2010 Winter Olympics and have said they would ransack offices and homes of board members of the 2010 Winter Olympics organizing committee.
The official Olympic rings.
Poor citizens are losing their homes due to the money spent and developments near the city on preparation for the long-awaited 2010 Winter Olympics, they believe.
Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan cited his concerns over the organization saying, “I think it gives the city a black eye. It doesn’t make Vancouver look good.”
This event follows an incident, last Saturday, during which anti-poverty activist David Cunningham was arrested. A police officer posed as a journalist for news source Vancouver 24 hours conducting what Cunningham believed to be a legitimate interview in downtown Vancouver. Cunningham was later arrested for alleged harassment, at a protest last Wednesday, to the 2010 Winter Olympic Games organizing committee.
The Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) said on Monday that they are disappointed with the police officer who posed as a journalist for 24 Hours.
…They’ve shown a callous disregard for the media’s ability to do its job…
“The police’s actions in this case were reprehensible,” CAJ President Paul Schneidereit concerned. “They’ve shown a callous disregard for the media’s ability to do its job, which can only be undermined by these foolish, play-acting escapades by police officers who should know better.”
“It is astonishing that police don’t seem to think the implications of these things through before they act. Even the police spokesman who explained what happened at a press conference Sunday expressed misgivings about using such a tactic,” Schneidereit said. “Impersonating a journalist is destructive on several levels. First, potential sources may refuse to speak to a reporter in the future, fearing they are not who they claim. That means information vital to the public interest may never get publicized. Second, journalists trying to do their jobs could now be in greater danger from those who, believing those journalists may be police officers, then threaten their physical well-being.”
24 Hours editor-in-chief, Dean Broughton, this week also expressed some disappointment at the actions of the police. Broughton said he is issuing a complaint with British Columbia’s Police Complaint Commissioner. “We strongly object to the police using such tactics. It undermines our credibility.”
According to information from CanadaNewsWire, British Columbia police, in November 2005, posed as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), made friends and drank wine with a man from a Kamloops, British Columbia jail, John Bjornstrom, who escaped after being arrested for ransacking cottages for approximately two years, then arrested him 5 hours later.
Flooding in South Asia, as in this archive picture, is common during the monsoon season. However, the flooding in Pakistan is some of the worst in living memory.Image: Miramurphy.
Since last reported, the flooding in Pakistan has spread and has now struck more than four million people. The UN reports it has left at least 1,600 people dead. The floods have been confirmed as the worst in eighty years.
Heavy monsoon rains led to the flooding of the huge Indus River, destroying homes in the north of the country and causing a large amount of damage in the north-west frontier province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Manuel Bessler of the United Nations said: “What we are facing now is a major catastrophe. We are afraid it will get worse.”
Army and government forces have rushed to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people from parts of the Punjab province of Pakistan, where the disaster spread to yesterday, and from Sindh province, where the flood is expected to reach by the weekend.
The flooding is now in its second week and the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon, especially since in many parts of the country there is still torrential rain, with more forecast. In other parts of Pakistan the water has receded, but this leaves a layer of mud and slime and this covers very large areas. For those affected by the floods, disease is the biggest problem now. The insanitary conditions have already caused diarrhoea and respiratory infections. Cholera and other water-borne diseases may appear if sanitary conditions for those displaced by the calamity are not established. Medical supplies are desperately needed for doctors to keep a pandemic or epidemic of a water-borne disease from infecting the victims of the flooding.
Relief has been hardest to provide in the north-west where many bridges and roads have been washed away. Whole towns have been cut off and this makes providing aid to those areas a very difficult task.
Air force pilots have been volunteering to fly aid missions to badly hit areas, transporting medical supplies, clean water and food to where it is needed. The transport planes carry enough foodstuffs to feed one hundred families for a month. Motivation for the missions among pilots is very high, as is the tension in the transport planes as they fly at 36,000 feet over the flood-hit country. Only from the air is the full extent of the damage visible. Pilots have been flying the maximum number of hours allowed and pushing the limits of their endurance to give the victims of the flood food, water and everything they need to survive.
Many foreign governments and aid agencies are contributing to the disaster relief effort. The U.S. Army has been flying relief missions, airlifting people from areas where they are stranded. The first mission involved four U.S. Chinook helicopters landing in the tourist town of Kalam in the Swat Valley, north-west Pakistan. The resort had been cut off for more than a week, according to a reporter there. The Chinooks flew hundreds of people to safer areas lower down. A U.S. Embassy spokesperson said that 800 people had been evacuated and relief goods had been distributed.
The U.S. government pledged 10 million dollars in assistance following the first reports of the disaster. Yesterday the country promised a further 25 million dollars in aid. A spokesperson from the Embassy said: “The U.S. is making a new contribution of 25 million dollars in assistance to flood-affected populations, bringing its total commitment to date to more than 35 million dollars.” The money will go to international aid organisations and established Pakistani aid groups to provide food, health care and shelter to people displaced by the floods.
Malaysia has also decided to contribute US$1 million for relief efforts in the form of humanitarian aid. The Foreign Ministry said the aid was a manifestation of the government and the people’s concern and sympathy. “The government of Malaysia hopes the contribution will help alleviate the suffering of flood victims in Pakistan.”
In Britain, the Disasters Emergency Committee, an umbrella organisation representing 13 of the leading UK humanitarian agencies, has been coordinating relief efforts and has launched an emergency appeal for public donations to help the victims of the crisis. Charities and aid agencies have been quick to respond to the disaster, sending aid and response teams to the worst hit areas. Food, water, shelter and medical supplies have been provided but much more is needed.
Patrick Fuller of the Red Cross (the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies), who has been based in the country for a few days, described the situation on the ground as “desperate” and said the worst hit areas are “totally dependent” on outside help. He said the Red Cross movement is working with local partners to get aid packages, containing cooking tools and shelter such as tents and blankets, to 35,000 families.
The Red Cross alone has distributed 10,000 food packs and 1000 tents across the affected areas so far. However, figures for the amount of aid distributed are constantly changing as this is an ongoing relief effort.
Fuller reported that in Nowshera, which is in the north-west of the country close to the Indus River, “80% of homes have been badly damaged or destroyed, all the mud-brick houses have been washed away.
“In the most remote areas – where roads are cut off – donkeys are making eight-hour hikes to reach people.
“We are trying to move people into temporary camps – giving them timber, roofing sheets and basic shelter – but there is the added complication that many are reluctant to leave whatever homes they have left.”This has also been a problem in the south of the country in Sindh province, where the flood is expected to reach by the weekend. Evacuations have been going on to move people out of the path of the flood but many will not join the mass exodus and have chosen to brave the waters.
“Many people rely on open wells, which have been contaminated, so access to clean water is a problem. We are worried about communicable diseases, like respiratory infections, skin diseases, diarrhoea,” Mr Fuller said.
The charity have been setting up mobile medical teams to better combat disease and infection.
Though the relief effort at the moment is focused on the survival of those hit by the catastrophe, on those who “had their lives swept away in seconds”, the relief effort is expected to last a full six months.
Those who will be most affected in the long term by this disaster will be the poorest. They will have had everything washed away from them so they will have to start from scratch. Sadly, for those living in the poorest areas in the north and centre of Pakistan, the fight for survival is only just beginning and though they may feel they are enduring much at the moment, getting their lives back together after the first stages of this calamity are over is going to be even harder.
The Disasters Emergency Committee has said it has managed to give aid to 300,000 people so far. Many UK charities have been distributing food and medicine, as well as water purification tablets, cooking tools, shelter and hygiene kits. They have been using rafts, boats and donkeys. Brendan Gormley, chief executive of the DEC, said: “These devastating floods have left millions fighting to survive with little food, clean water or shelter.”
The DEC has appealed for donations from the public of the UK to help the victims of this crisis. The appeal is to allow the charities to continue relief work in the worst hit areas of the country.
Following a television appeal by the DEC, £2.5 million was raised and this has enabled the 13 charities the committee represents to reach 300,000 people with emergency supplies.
Stardust is a NASA space capsule that collected samples from comet 81P/Wild (also known as “Wild 2) in deep space and landed back on Earth on January 15, 2006. It was decided that a collaborative online review process would be used to “discover” the microscopically small samples the capsule collected. The project is called Stardust@home. Unlike distributed computing projects like SETI@home, Stardust@home relies entirely on human intelligence.
Andrew Westphal is the director of Stardust@home. Wikinews interviewed him for May’s Interview of the Month (IOTM) on May 18, 2006. As always, the interview was conducted on IRC, with multiple people asking questions.
Some may not know exactly what Stardust or Stardust@home is. Can you explain more about it for us?
Artist’s rendering of Spacecraft StardustImage: NASA.
Stardust is a NASA Discovery mission that was launched in 1999. It is really two missions in one. The primary science goal of the mission was to collect a sample from a known primitive solar-system body, a comet called Wild 2 (pronounced “Vilt-two” — the discoverer was German, I believe). This is the first [US]] “sample return” mission since Apollo, and the first ever from beyond the moon. This gives a little context. By “sample return” of course I mean a mission that brings back extraterrestrial material. I should have said above that this is the first “solid” sample return mission — Genesis brought back a sample from the Sun almost two years ago, but Stardust is also bringing back the first solid samples from the local interstellar medium — basically this is a sample of the Galaxy. This is absolutely unprecedented, and we’re obviously incredibly excited. I should mention parenthetically that there is a fantastic launch video — taken from the POV of the rocket on the JPL Stardust website — highly recommended — best I’ve ever seen — all the way from the launch pad, too. Basically interplanetary trajectory. Absolutely great.
Is the video available to the public?
Yes [see below]. OK, I digress. The first challenge that we have before can do any kind of analysis of these interstellar dust particles is simply to find them. This is a big challenge because they are very small (order of micron in size) and are somewhere (we don’t know where) on a HUGE collector— at least on the scale of the particle size — about a tenth of a square meter. So…
We’re right now using an automated microscope that we developed several years ago for nuclear astrophysics work to scan the collector in the Cosmic Dust Lab in Building 31 at Johnson Space Center. This is the ARES group that handles returned samples (Moon Rocks, Genesis chips, Meteorites, and Interplanetary Dust Particles collected by U2 in the stratosphere). The microscope collects stacks of digital images of the aerogel collectors in the array. These images are sent to us — we compress them and convert them into a format appropriate for Stardust@home.
Stardust@home is a highly distributed project using a “Virtual Microscope” that is written in html and javascript and runs on most browsers — no downloads are required. Using the Virtual Microscope volunteers can search over the collector for the tracks of the interstellar dust particles.
Aerogel slice removed with an ultrasonic blade, showing particle tracks.Image: NASA.
How many samples do you anticipate being found during the course of the project?
Great question. The short answer is that we don’t know. The long answer is a bit more complicated. Here’s what we know. The Galileo and Ulysses spacecraft carried dust detectors onboard that Eberhard Gruen and his colleagues used to first detect and them measure the flux of interstellar dust particles streaming into the solar system. (This is a kind of “wind” of interstellar dust, caused by the fact that our solar system is moving with respect to the local interstellar medium.) Markus Landgraf has estimated the number of interstellar dust particles that should have been captured by Stardust during two periods of the “cruise” phase of the interplanetary orbit in which the spacecraft was moving with this wind. He estimated that there should be around 45 particles, but this number is very uncertain — I wouldn’t be surprised if it is quite different from that. That was the long answer! One thing that I should say…is that like all research, the outcome of what we are doing is highly uncertain. There is a wonderful quote attributed to Einstein — “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called “research”, would it?”
How big would the samples be?
We expect that the particles will be of order a micron in size. (A millionth of a meter.) When people are searching using the virtual microscope, they will be looking not for the particles, but for the tracks that the particles make, which are much larger — several microns in diameter. Just yesterday we switched over to a new site which has a demo of the VM (virtual microscope) I invite you to check it out. The tracks in the demo are from submicron carbonyl iron particles that were shot into aerogel using a particle accelerator modified to accelerate dust particles to very high speeds, to simulate the interstellar dust impacts that we’re looking for.
And that’s on the main Stardust@home website [see below]?
Yes.
How long will the project take to complete?
Partly the answer depends on what you mean by “the project”. The search will take several months. The bottleneck, we expect (but don’t really know yet) is in the scanning — we can only scan about one tile per day and there are 130 tiles in the collector…. These particles will be quite diverse, so we’re hoping that we’ll continue to have lots of volunteers collaborating with us on this after the initial discoveries. It may be that the 50th particle that we find will be the real Rosetta stone that turns out to be critical to our understanding of interstellar dust. So we really want to find them all! Enlarging the idea of the project a little, beyond the search, though is to actually analyze these particles. That’s the whole point, obviously!
And this is the huge advantage with this kind of a mission — a “sample return” mission.
Most missions rather do things quite differently… you have to build an instrument to make a measurement and that instrument design gets locked in several years before launch practically guaranteeing that it will be obsolete by the time you launch. Here exactly the opposite is true. Several of the instruments that are now being used to analyze the cometary dust did not exist when the mission was launched. Further, some instruments (e.g., synchrotrons) are the size of shopping malls — you don’t have a hope of flying these in space. So we can and will study these samples for many years. AND we have to preserve some of these dust particles for our grandchildren to analyze with their hyper-quark-gluon plasma microscopes (or whatever)!
When do you anticipate the project to start?
We’re really frustrated with the delays that we’ve been having. Some of it has to do with learning how to deal with the aerogel collectors, which are rougher and more fractured than we expected. The good news is that they are pretty clean — there is very little of the dust that you see on our training images — these were deliberately left out in the lab to collect dust so that we could give people experience with the worst case we could think of. In learning how to do the scanning of the actual flight aerogel, we uncovered a couple of bugs in our scanning software — which forced us to go back and rescan. Part of the other reason for the delay was that we had to learn how to handle the collector — it would cost $200M to replace it if something happened to it, so we had to develop procedures to deal with it, and add several new safety features to the Cosmic Dust Lab. This all took time. Finally, we’re distracted because we also have many responsibilities for the cometary analysis, which has a deadline of August 15 for finishing analysis. The IS project has no such deadline, so at times we had to delay the IS (interstellar, sorry) in order to focus on the cometary work. We are very grateful to everyone for their patience on this — I mean that very sincerely.
And rest assured that we’re just as frustrated!
I know there will be a “test” that participants will have to take before they can examine the “real thing”. What will that test consist of?
The test will look very similar to the training images that you can look at now. But.. there will of course be no annotation to tell you where the tracks are!
Why did NASA decide to take the route of distributed computing? Will they do this again?
I wouldn’t say that NASA decided to do this — the idea for Stardust@home originated here at U. C. Berkeley. Part of the idea of course came…
If I understand correctly it isn’t distributed computing, but distributed eyeballing?
…from the SETI@home people who are just down the hall from us. But as Brian just pointed out. this is not really distributed computing like SETI@home the computers are just platforms for the VM and it is human eyes and brains who are doing the real work which makes it fun (IMHO).
That said… There have been quite a few people who have expressed interested in developing automated algorithms for searching. Just because WE don’t know how to write such an algorithm doesn’t mean nobody does. We’re delighted at this and are happy to help make it happen
Isn’t there a catch 22 that the data you’re going to collect would be a prerequisite to automating the process?
That was the conclusion that we came to early on — that we would need some sort of training set to be able to train an algorithm. Of course you have to train people too, but we’re hoping (we’ll see!) that people are more flexible in recognizing things that they’ve never seen before and pointing them out. Our experience is that people who have never seen a track in aerogel can learn to recognize them very quickly, even against a big background of cracks, dust and other sources of confusion… Coming back to the original question — although NASA didn’t originate the idea, they are very generously supporting this project. It wouldn’t have happened without NASA’s financial support (and of course access to the Stardust collector). Did that answer the question?
Will a project like this be done again?
I don’t know… There are only a few projects for which this approach makes sense… In fact, I frankly haven’t run across another at least in Space Science. But I am totally open to the idea of it. I am not in favor of just doing it as “make-work” — that is just artificially taking this approach when another approach would make more sense.
How did the idea come up to do this kind of project?
Really desperation. When we first thought about this we assumed that we would use some sort of automated image recognition technique. We asked some experts around here in CS and the conclusion was that the problem was somewhere between trivial and impossible, and we wouldn’t know until we had some real examples to work with. So we talked with Dan Wertheimer and Dave Anderson (literally down the hall from us) about the idea of a distributed project, and they were quite encouraging. Dave proposed the VM machinery, and Josh Von Korff, a physics grad student, implemented it. (Beautifully, I think. I take no credit!)
I got to meet one of the stardust directors in March during the Texas Aerospace Scholars program at JSC. She talked about searching for meteors in Antarctica, one that were unblemished by Earth conditions. Is that our best chance of finding new information on comets and asteroids? Or will more Stardust programs be our best solution?
That’s a really good question. Much will depend on what we learn during this official “Preliminary Examination” period for the cometary analysis. Aerogel capture is pretty darn good, but it’s not perfect and things are altered during capture in ways that we’re still understanding. I think that much also depends on what question you’re asking. For example, some of the most important science is done by measuring the relative abundances of isotopes in samples, and these are not affected (at least not much) by capture into aerogel.
Also, she talked about how some of the agencies that they gave samples to had lost or destroyed 2-3 samples while trying to analyze them. That one, in fact, had been statically charged, and stuck to the side of the microscope lens and they spent over an hour looking for it. Is that really our biggest danger? Giving out samples as a show of good faith, and not letting NASA example all samples collected?
These will be the first measurements, probably, that we’ll make on the interstellar dust There is always a risk of loss. Fortunately for the cometary samples there is quite a lot there, so it’s not a disaster. NASA has some analytical capabilities, particularly at JSC, but the vast majority of the analytical capability in the community is not at NASA but is at universities, government labs and other institutions all over the world. I should also point out that practically every analytical technique is destructive at some level. (There are a few exceptions, but not many.) The problem with meteorites is that except in a very few cases, we don’t know where they specifically came from. So having a sample that we know for sure is from the comet is golden!
I am currently working on my Bachelor’s in computer science, with a minor in astronomy. Do you see successes of programs like Stardust to open up more private space exploration positions for people such as myself. Even though I’m not in the typical “space” fields of education?
Can you elaborate on your question a little — I’m not sure that I understand…
Well, while at JSC I learned that they mostly want Engineers, and a few science grads, and I worry that my computer science degree with not be very valuable, as the NASA rep told me only 1% of the applicants for their work study program are CS majors. I’m just curious as to your thoughts on if CS majors will be more in demand now that projects like Stardust and the Mars missions have been great successes? Have you seen a trend towards more private businesses moving in that direction, especially with President Bush’s statement of Man on the Moon in 2015?
That’s a good question. I am personally not very optimistic about the direction that NASA is going. Despite recent successes, including but not limited to Stardust, science at NASA is being decimated.
I made a joke with some people at the TAS event that one day SpaceShipOne will be sent up to save stranded ISS astronauts. It makes me wonder what kind of private redundancy the US government is taking for future missions.
I guess one thing to be a little cautious about is that despite SpaceShipOne’s success, we haven’t had an orbital project that has been successful in that style of private enterprise It would be nice to see that happen. I know that there’s a lot of interest…!
Now I know the answer to this question… but a lot do not… When samples are found, How will they be analyzed? Who gets the credit for finding the samples?
The first person who identifies an interstellar dust particle will be acknowledged on the website (and probably will be much in demand for interviews from the media!), will have the privilege of naming the particle, and will be a co-author on any papers that WE (at UCB) publish on the analysis of the particle. Also, although we are precluded from paying for travel expenses, we will invite those who discover particles AND the top performers to our lab for a hands-on tour.
We have some fun things, including micromachines.
How many people/participants do you expect to have?
About 113,000 have preregistered on our website. Frankly, I don’t have a clue how many will actually volunteer and do a substantial amount of searching. We’ve never done this before, after all!
One last thing I want to say … well, two. First, we are going to special efforts not to do any searching ourselves before we go “live”. It would not be fair to all the volunteers for us to get a jumpstart on the search. All we are doing is looking at a few random views to make sure that the focus and illumination are good. (And we haven’t seen anything — no surprise at all!) Also, the attitude for this should be “Have Fun”. If you’re not having fun doing it, stop and do something else! A good maxim for life in general!
Robert Gibbs, the former press secretary for the U.S. White House, has been said to be in talks with Facebook about possible future employment as a manager for the communications aspect of the company.
According to an anonymous source close to the company, Gibbs is being pressed to quickly accept the job, in which Mr. Gibbs may receive millions of dollars in both salary and initial stock options for a planned public offering of Facebook Inc. in 2012.
Both Facebook and Gibbs have declined to comment.
Mr. Gibbs, who has worked for the Obama administration for two years, left in February 2011, and was reportedly “relaxing” and had denied rumors that he was planning to campaign for chairman of the Democratic National Committee if Tim Kaine were to leave the committee to run for a position in the senate.
In recent months, Facebook has stepped up lobbying the US capital to communicate its public image to policy makers, and may use Gibbs for their public relations stratagem in the future.
