Hunting for Planets from the Comfort of Your Own Home
discount gucci bagsIn the two years since it went into space, the Kepler satellite has revolutionized the search for planets around other stars. Before Kepler went into space, about 500 so-called exoplanets had been found, one by painstaking one over the course of more than a decade. Since then, Kepler has added another 1,200, and that's just a fraction of the planets the probe will ultimately discover. (To be technical, the bodies Kepler finds are known as "candidate planets" that need confirmation, but no one doubts that the vast majority of them are real.) One reason Kepler has been so wildly successful is that it stares at a huge number of stars some 150,000 of them, around the clock looking for tiny dips of light. That change in luminescence indicates that a planet is passing in front of the star. No human could possibly sort through all that data, so the Kepler team has created a kind of sifter software that looks for patterns hinting at orbiting planets. (See TIME's photoessay "The Labor of Space Exploration.") But while computers are terrific at high-volume data-processing, nothing beats the human eye for pattern-recognition which is why a project dreamed up by Yale University astronomer Debra Fischer, a veteran planet hunter and Kepler project scientist, has turned out to be so extraordinarily useful. cheap nike shoes store Called Planethunters.org, it lets ordinary folks with no scientific training at all help find planets the Kepler software has missed. It works so well that in just a few short months of operation, the more than 22,000 visitors to the website have found nearly 50 potential planets, which are being sent on to Kepler headquarters at the NASA Ames Research Center in California for followup. You might think the planethunters team would require people who click on the site to undergo a fair amount of online training before allowing them to look at real data but you'd be wrong. Gucci Abbey Bags"We've got all sorts of online tutorials which explain the science," says Fischer. "But people don't have to look at them, and most don't." Instead, you can cut straight to the real stuff : a simple explanation of what you're supposed to look for (a series of regular dips in a given star's "lightcurve," which is just a graph of its brightness over time) and how use an onscreen box to mark any suspicious spots. That's pretty much it except that the last screen asks: "Logged in users get to see the best stars and get credit for their work. Would you like to login?" Think many folks say no? (See amazing photos of the sun.) Once they start looking, says Fischer, some people stay only a short while, but others hang in, looking for dips and answering simple online questions about them. "We have people doing 100 [stars], 5,000 the users created their own 5,000 club and even 20,000." No one sighting qualifies as a likely detection, but if enough users finger the same star, the scientists take notice.
Finland's Educational Success? The AntiâTiger Mother Approach
discount gucci bagsSpring may be just around the corner in this poor part of Helsinki known as the Deep East, but the ground is still mostly snow-covered and the air has a dry, cold bite. In a clearing outside the Kallahti Comprehensive School, a handful of 9-year-olds are sitting back to back, arranging sticks, pinecones, stones and berries into shapes on the frozen ground. The arrangers will then have to describe these shapes using geometric terms so the kids who can't see them can say what they are. "It's a different way of conceptualizing math when you do it this way instead of using pen and paper, and it goes straight to the brain," says Veli-Matti Harjula, who teaches the same group of children straight through from third to sixth grade. Educators in Sweden, not Finland, came up with the concept of "outside math," but Harjula didn't have to get anybody's approval to borrow it. gucci handbags on saleHe can pretty much do whatever he wants, provided that his students meet the very general objectives of the core curriculum set by Finland's National Board of Education. For math, the latest national core curriculum runs just under 10 pages (up from 3? pages for the previous core curriculum). (See "Paying Kids for Good Grades: Does It Work?") The Finns are as surprised as much as anyone else that they have recently emerged as the new rock stars of global education. It surprises them because they do as little measuring and testing as they can get away with. They just don't believe it does much good. They did, however, decide to participate in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). And to put it in a way that would make the noncompetitive Finns cringe, they kicked major butt. The Finns have participated in the global survey four times and have usually placed among the top three finishers in reading, math and science. In the latest PISA survey, in 2009, Finland placed second in science literacy, third in mathematics and second in reading. cheap nike shoes storeThe U.S. came in 15th in reading, close to the OECD average, which is where most of the U.S.'s results fell. Finland's only real rivals are the Asian education powerhouses South Korea and Singapore, whose drill-heavy teaching methods often recall those of the old Soviet-bloc Olympic-medal programs. Indeed, a recent manifesto by Chinese-American mother Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, chides American parents for shrinking from the pitiless discipline she argues is necessary to turn out great students. Her book has led many to wonder whether the cure is worse than the disease. (See pictures of a Mandarin school in Minneapolis.) Which is why delegations from the U.S. and the rest of the world are trooping to Helsinki, where world-class results are achieved to the strains of a reindeer lullaby. "In Asia, it's about long hours long hours in school, long hours after school. In Finland, the school day is shorter than it is in the U.S. It's a more appealing model,"Gucci New Jackie Bags says Andreas Schleicher, who directs the PISA program at the OECD. There's less homework too. "An hour a day is good enough to be a successful student," says Katja Tuori, who is in charge of student counseling at Kallahti Comprehensive, which educates kids up to age 16. "These kids have a life." (See pictures of summer-school programs.) There are rules, of course. No iPods or portable phones in class. No hats indoors. (They also tried a no-coat rule, but it was just too cold.) But not much else. Tuori spots a kid texting in class and shoots him a reproachful glance. He quickly puts the phone away. Gucci Pelham Bags "You have to do something really bad, like hit somebody, to actually get punished," says Tuori.
Why They Fight: Civil War Re-enactors and the Battle over Historic Sites
gucci outletTo create these pictures, photographer Gregg Segal collaborated with Civil War re-enactors to construct scenes at historic battle sites that have been compromised by modern development. The past is never dead, wrote William Faulkner of Oxford, Mississippi. Its not even past. In Europe, they know this. Modern apartment buildings in Rome are built on Renaissance foundations that in turn contain bits of ruins that are thousands of years old. In Germany its not unusual for a work site to shut down suddenly, or for a neighborhood to be evacuated, after the discovery of an unexploded bomb from World War II. Americans, though, have always focused more on making the history of tomorrow, rather than remembering the history of long ago. cheap gucci outlet storeAnd so, 150 years after the Civil War, many of the fields on which soldiers bled and died are nearly forgotten, buried beneath parking lots and subdivisions and interstate highways. Yet, at the same time, the wounds of that terrible war have never fully gone away. They live on in the mental terrain even as they are wiped from the physical landscape. Photographer Gregg Segal decided in 2009 to try to bring the ghosts of the war back to the places they once inhabited so fearsomely. coach outlet Working with the renowned re-enactor Robert Hodge and his colleagues, Segal identified battlefields from Gettysburg to Nashville, Cedar Creek to Atlanta. Places where the mundane humdrum of today covers ground that was once, to borrow a phrase from historian Stephen W. Sears, landscape turned red. State of the Union is a juxtaposition of two contrastive eras, Segal says of the finished project, an idealized Civil War embodied by period re-enactors vs. the commercialism of contemporary life. I wanted locations where actual Civil War battles had taken place and that were now part of the commercial world, Segal continues. Rob was very familiar with just such locations as hes been fighting for years to preserve battlefield land from development. The images, which are first of all very inviting with their bold color and dramatic lighting, pack a complex wallop. At first they are funnyproving the theory that humor arises from the unexpected collision of jarring frames of reference. But deeper lies a strong poignancy. These ancestors are all around us, if only we could see them. Gucci New Jackie Bags And what do they think of us, and of what weve done with the world they passed along? These pictures ask us to remember that it happened right hereright where our car slowly drips transmission fluid onto the vast parking lot outside Staples, or where we stand and drink a beer with the neighbors while steaks sizzle on the shiny new gas grill and kids thumb their new Xbox controllers in the basement. And they tell us it could never happen again. Were too busy shopping.
Russia, U.S. in Space Anniversary Double-Header This Week
cheap gucci outlet storeNASA's probably breathing easier this week after last's near-catastrophic government shutdown, and what better way to pop a celebratory cork (or two) than with a couple big anniversary events. Tomorrow marks both the 50th anniversary of humanity's first trip into space, as well as the 30th anniversary of NASA's first ever Space Shuttle launch. discount gucci bagsWho was first into space? Yuri Gagarin (that's him up top), a Russian cosmonaut whose tiny torpedo-like Vostok spacecraft completed a full trip around the Earth on April 12, 1961. It took America and NASA another month to get Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard into orbit (though Shepard's original flight had been planned for as early as October 1960). Tuesday's other glass-raiser would be the April 12, 1981 launch of the Space Shuttle Columbia, NASA's first in the Shuttle series--also, tragically, the second (after Challenger in January 1986) lost to catastrophe, along with its crew, when it broke part during reentry on February 1, 2003. It sounds like the six astronauts currently aboard the International Space Station will partake of celebration pleasantries (though whether with actual libations or astronaut-friendly substitutes, who knows). The final spot of Tuesday space-news has to do with NASA announcing which museums will have dibs on retired Space Shuttles for public display. Gucci Positano & Hysteria BagsAccording to ABC News, the ISS astronauts "say they're impartial" to who gets what.
thickens on ancient temple walls. Rivers swell and flush their trash and frothing human waste into the sea off Kuta Beach, the island's most famous tourist
attraction, where bacteria bloom and the water turns muddy with dead plankton. "It happens every year," shrugs Wayan Sumerta, a Kuta lifeguard, who sits with
his love-struck Japanese girlfriend amid dunes of surf-tossed garbage. So why, in early March, did the Bali authorities warn tourists that swimming there for
over 30 minutes could cause skin infections? The lifeguard tenderly strokes his girlfriend's naked leg. "I guess some people just have sensitive skin," he
says.
Itchy ocean? Just add it to Bali's growing list of seemingly intractable problems: water shortages, rolling blackouts, uncollected trash, overflowing sewage
-treatment plants and traffic so bad that parts of the island resemble Indonesia's gridlocked capital Jakarta. And don't forget crime. In January, amid a
spate of violent robberies against foreigners, Bali police chief Hadiatmoko reportedly ordered his officers to shoot criminals on sight. You've heard of the
Julia Roberts movie Eat Pray Love, which was partly filmed in Bali? discount gucci bagsNow get ready for its
grim sequel: Eat Pray Duck. (Read about Bali's travel boom.)
Most of Bali's woes stem from a problem that rival resorts would love to have: too many tourists. In 2001, the island welcomed about 1.3 million foreign
visitors. Ten years later and despite bombings by Islamic extremists in 2002 and 2005 that killed 222 people, mostly Australian tourists the island
expects almost twice that number. And there are millions of Indonesian visitors too.
Hotels, shopping centers and restaurants are springing up everywhere to accommodate them. The cranes looming over Kuta are building at least three malls and
a five-star hotel. But the less glamorous stuff roads, power lines, sewers, parking spaces often remains an afterthought. " Nike outletThe infrastructure is not keeping up with the development," says Ron Nomura, marketing director at the
Bali Hotels Association. The island's lack of reservoirs, he says, is a case in point. "Can you believe there is this much rain and we don't have enough
water?" (See "The Best of Asia 2010.")
When it comes to Bali, newspaper editors have a seemingly bottomless stock of "Paradise Lost?" headlines. Its rich Hindu culture is so distinctive that many
people mistake the island for a separate country rather than a province of the world's most populous Muslim nation. That Bali's tourism industry has survived
terrorism attacks and a global recession is a cause for pride. But amid unchecked growth and a creaking infrastructure, it is also a source of complacency.
"It's like Bali is slowly committing suicide," says local journalist Wayan Juniarta.
Bali's Governor I Made Mangku Pastika knows it. In January, he issued a moratorium on new construction in certain built-up areas, and later warned that his
lush birthplace might turn into a "dry land full of concrete buildings." Pastika is popular he investigated the bombings as Bali's then police chief
but his moratorium isn't.Gucci D Gold Bags "Some people says he's trying to slow down
Bali's growth," says Nomura. "That's not necessarily true. What he's looking for is more responsible growth."
Gucci Indy BagsHe probably won't find it. Nobody I talked to reckoned that Pastika's
measures would influence who built what where. Bali's spiritualism might be a bewildering blend of Hinduism, Buddhism and animism, but the island's planning
