This year marks National Geographic Traveler's 25th annual photo contest, which invites amateurs to submit their best snaps for review by the mag's venerable photo editors. Last night, the winners were revealed in all their high-res glory.
Source: http://gizmodo.com/here-are-national-geographic-travelers-best-photos-of-1002461925
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(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) The Green children get get a look at their new home for the first time, Thursday, August 1, 2013. Jeremy and Christianne Green's family includes six special-needs children. The wheelchair-accessible home was partly funded by donations nationwide and from Herriman-based Huish Construction. The home features a Rapunzel-like castle that connects to several rooms, lower-to-the-ground light switches and sinks.
New home built for Utah family?s special-needs kids
| The Salt Lake Tribune
First Published Aug 01 2013 07:24 pm ? Last Updated Aug 01 2013 10:55 pmJeremy and Christianne Green unveiled their new home in Herriman on Thursday to five of their special-needs daughters.
Built partly by nationwide donations through Puzzle Them Home and by Herriman-based Huish Construction and other local businesses, the home features light switches and sinks that are lower to the ground to accommodate Sophi, who was born without arms; an elevator for Cali, who uses a wheelchair due to spina bifida; and a special safe playroom for Elli, who is blind and autistic.
The Greens? previous 2,600-foot-square home was too small for their three biological children and six special-needs children adopted from China.
Online contributions are still being accepted at puzzlethemhome.org to help the family pay down their mortgage.
Copyright 2013 The Salt Lake Tribune. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Source: http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/56677999-78/special-needs-built-family.html.csp
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For the next year, NPR will take a musical journey across America, which is one of the most religiously diverse countries on earth. We want to discover and celebrate the many ways in which people make spiritual music ? individually and collectively, inside and outside houses of worship.
The founder of the choral group Sounds of Africa is Fred Onovwerosuoke. He was born in Ghana and brought up in Nigeria, and his choir in the heart of the U.S. ? St. Louis, Mo., to be exact ? has recorded his arrangements of African sacred music by a composer named Ikoli Harcourt Whyte.
Whyte lived in a leper colony run by the Methodist Church. He formed a choir of those also confined there and, Onovwerosuoke says, "composed and wrote for them some of the most moving spiritual music."
Onovwerosuoke says he remembers record stores in Nigeria blasting Harcourt Whyte's music from huge outside speakers. He sang in the choir of his Anglican church.
Onovwerosuoke's family was friendly with the local priest and imam. He soaked up what he heard at church and in the mosque. As a teenager, he became an amateur ethnomusicologist; he traveled around the continent with his Walkman, taping musicians from 35 African countries. Now, those field recordings help Midwesterners understand the music from Africa they're singing.
'A Kernel Of What Is Possible'
Rose Fisher is Songs of Africa's assistant director. She's guiding the choir through lyrics in Yoruba, a tonal language from West Africa. An hour later, they're singing it as part of a service at Pilgrim Congregational Church.
Music from Africa can be incredibly challenging for Western singers, says soprano Marlissa Hudson, who has recorded music arranged by Onovwerosuoke. She says none of her classical training prepared her for the complexities of its rhythms.
"You can't count when you're singing that kind of music, so Fred actually danced it for me," Hudson says. "As soon as he danced, it clicked."
Hudson says part of understanding African sacred music for her meant thinking about its colonial context. It's beautiful music with a violent history: the music of oppressed people combined with the music of their oppressors.
"It's the same story as the spirituals," Hudson says. "But within that oppression, much like in the spirituals ? even in the depth of the sadness ? there's a kernel of what is possible."
A Better Peace
This is music born of pain, and it insists on life, on resilience, on a connection to something beyond human suffering. Part of the power of these hymns comes from how they assimilated customs and musical traditions rooted far from Christianity, Onovwerosuoke says. Melissa Breed Parks is part of his core ensemble. She's wearing a yellow robe and embroidered headscarf that don't look to be part of her own faith tradition.
"I'm Quaker, and we don't sing or even really talk," Parks says. "Our meetings are mostly silent."
Songs of Africa, she says, allows her to express another facet of her spirituality. Here's what Fred Onovwerosuoke said when I asked him how he teaches Americans to sing sacred music from Africa: "Well, the same way Africans or non-Americans will sing a Mozart motet or whatever," he says. "My philosophy of life is that I think there will be better peace in the world if we share of other cultures as much as they share of our own American experience."
To use music to quiet the ghosts of history, by moving the world closer by celebrating African music in services along with Western hymns ? nothing, Onovwerosuoke says, could make music more sacred.
Source: http://news.wpr.org/post/songs-africa-beautiful-music-violent-history
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GearFactor/~3/rbkwEFV8Pig/
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WASHINGTON (AP) ? The Postal Service takes pictures of every piece of mail processed in the United States ? 160 billion last year ? and keeps them on hand for up to a month.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said the photos of the exterior of mail pieces are used primarily for the sorting process, but they are available for law enforcement, if requested.
The photos have been used "a couple of times" by to trace letters in criminal cases, Donahoe told the AP on Thursday, most recently involving ricin-laced letters sent to President Barack Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
"We don't snoop on customers," said Donahoe, adding that there's no big database of the images because they are kept on nearly 200 machines at processing facilities across the country. Each machine retains only the images of the mail it processes.
"It's done by machine, so there's no central area where any of this information would be," he said. "It's extremely expensive to keep pictures of billions of pieces of mail. So there's no need for us to do that."
The images are generally stored for between a week and 30 days and then disposed of, he said. Keeping the images for those periods may be necessary to ensure delivery accuracy, for forwarding mail or making sure that the proper postage was paid, he said.
"Law enforcement has requested a couple of times if there's any way we could figure out where something came from," he said. "And we've done a little bit of that in the ricin attacks."
The automated mail tracking program was created after the deadly anthrax attacks in 2001 so the Postal Service could more easily track hazardous substances and keep people safe, Donahoe said.
"We've got a process in place that pretty much outlines, in any specific facility, the path that mail goes through," he said. "So if anything ever happens, God forbid, we would be able very quickly to track back to see what building it was in, what machines it was on, that type of thing. That's the intent of the whole program."
Processing machines take photographs so software can read the images to create a barcode that is stamped on the mail to show where and when it was processed, and where it will be delivered, Donahoe said.
The Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program was cited by the FBI on June 7 in an affidavit that was part of the investigation into who was behind threatening, ricin-tainted letters sent to Obama and Bloomberg. The program "photographs and captures an image of every piece of mail that is processed," the affidavit by an FBI agent said.
Mail from the same mailbox tends to get clumped together in the same batch, so that can help investigators track where a particular item was mailed from to possibly identify the sender.
"We've used (the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program) to sort the mail for years," Donahoe said, "and when law enforcement asked us, 'Hey, is there any way you can figure out where this came from?' we were able to use that imaging."
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ap-interview-usps-takes-photos-mail-072949079.html
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11 hours ago
Somewhere along Route 9W in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., on Thursday morning, I achieved auto nirvana.
I was driving the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Vitesse, which happens to be the fastest production roadster on the planet. But with the top down and the sun shining down, it felt like a gentle morning drive?until the traffic cleared and I pressed down on the accelerator.
The 1,200 horsepower W-16 engine roared to life with a sound that I can only describe as somewhere between thunder, a lion's roar and the ghost of jazz drummer Gene Krupa. My head shot back against the seat, the wheels gripped the road and suddenly the world was passing by with a beautiful blur.
No, I didn't check the speedometer. But at that moment, the comfort, ease, and artistry of the Bugatti Vitesse suddenly became clear. I still can't fathom the $2.3 million price. But I now understand where cars end and experiences begin.
"It's beauty and the beast," said John Hill, head of sales and marketing for Bugatti North America.
(Read more: Amazing supercar experiences)
Adam Jeffery / CNBC
CNBC's Robert Frank test drives the $2.3 million Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Vitesse, the fastest production roadster on the planet.
Bugatti is making only 150 Grand Sports. Most have already been sold, and about half of the approximately 60 left will likely be Vitesses, Hill said.
But despite its price, the Vitesse is already selling quickly to super-rich collectors around the world. Hill said that most of his clients are self-made entrepreneurs, and they range in age from 23 to over 70.
More than half of them own more than one Bugatti, he said, and one customer owns at least 10.
"People get addicted," he said.
Bugatti's mission, under the ownership of the Volkswagen Group, has always been to build the best of the best. And with the Vitesse, they've certainly packed it with superlatives?fastest, most expensive, among the most exclusive. It can hit 258 mph with the top on and 254 mph with the top off.
But don't let the speed fool you. Unlike many supercars, the Vitesse is easy to drive around town at everyday speeds.
The interior is simple, clean and intuitive. The air conditioning, stereo system and on-board cameras are top notch. The ride is smooth, due to a softening of the suspension system. And the accelerator has a gradual feel, as opposed to the lightening touch, rocket-pedal feel of some cars. It gives even an average driver like myself the confidence to take it higher.
It's a weapons-grade missile and an around-town show-model all in one.
When the Volkswagen chairman set the mission for the Veyron, he asked for a car that could set speed records, do zero to 60 in under three seconds and still "drive it to the opera," Hill said.
I didn't go to the opera Thursday morning, but hearing that massive engine fire up as I rocketed down Route 9W was the auto version of an orchestra.
?By CNBC's Robert Frank. Follow him on Twitter @robtfrank.
? 2013 CNBC LLC. All Rights Reserved
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If there is one thing Windows Phone supporters are good at, it?s self-promotion. We have a lot of evangelists in the crowd who want to get the word out about their OS of choice. We don?t blame you either, but we?re only as good as the tools we have to work with, which is why Tile Me! is worthy of your attention.
Over in the sub-Reddit dedicated to Windows Phone, a social media consultant named David Kimball had an idea: why not create profile pictures that looked like the Windows Phone Me Tile? The idea was to allow you to change your profile pic on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc., with the Windows Phone styled design, resulting in more awareness.
While a solid idea, it did lack one thing: practicality. That?s because David was creating the images one-by-one based on user request (see his website). While certainly helpful, in the long run that would not be feasible, especially if we sent a hundred thousand of our daily readers there.
Enter developer InfiniteLoop who decided to automate the process. What better way to do that than with a free (ad supported) Windows Phone app? Users can download Tile Me! for free, insert an image, pick their tile color and save it to their library for profile replacement. A paid version is evidently on the way, should you want to support the dev, but for now, you can use the ad-supported and free version.
In the future, we'd like to see support for the higher quality PNG format in addition to JPEG, but for now we'll take what we can get.
Overall, it?s a nifty little app powered by a great idea.
Pick up Tile Me! here in the Store. All Windows Phones. Thanks, Justin M., for the tip!
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wmexperts/~3/piUumZemh8s/story01.htm
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